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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out 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 lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 single mother. “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, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “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 performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed 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 told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for 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 winning people over, and she had faith 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 sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny