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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable 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 late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they live in this space between confidence and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return 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 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, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave 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 liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” 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 enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware 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 bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – she won a notable 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