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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress 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 liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. 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 connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return 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 traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates 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 equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 lengthy 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 subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was permeated 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny