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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active amateur dramatics 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 high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines 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? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 shocked that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious 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