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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 slag 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 afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential 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 drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, 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 gets to the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return 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 returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – 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 outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests 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 an autoimmune condition, 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 told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny