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‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. 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 considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – 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 were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity 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 distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a notable 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