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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire 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 focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they reside in this space between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her anecdote provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had 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 told you have 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 problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny