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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser 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 pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live 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 grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (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 performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 ups and downs, if we haven’t split up 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 white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny