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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny