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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message 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 facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant 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 while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical 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 nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went 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 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, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison 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 come 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 immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking 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 created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny