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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt 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 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 gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist 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 picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, 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 personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; 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 thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny