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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire 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 wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 touches on the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased 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 recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

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 another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy 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 simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a notable 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