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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act 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 funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector 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 pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby 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 reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back 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 single mother. “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 cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘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 another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, 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 unwell 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 following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – 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