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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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 explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up 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, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape 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 another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of 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 persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – she won a prestigious 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