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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls 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 elegant attire with your lingerie 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 wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner 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 nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought 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 late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave 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 debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 issues, if we haven’t split up 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy 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 sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a major 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