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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny