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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant 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 treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with 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 bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they live in this space between pride and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, 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 long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

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 an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 anecdote generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy 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 quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny