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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. 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 bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny