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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes 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 parent, as a spouse and as a picker 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 nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they live in this area between confidence and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back 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 went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, 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 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 let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – 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 were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious 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