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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, 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. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period 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 didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point 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 undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 amazed that her anecdote provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew 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 bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious 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