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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress 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 liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this space between pride and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. 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 bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, 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 remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

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 controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; 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 breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? 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 story caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith 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 riddled 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny