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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; 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 eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned 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 were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, 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 remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny