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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared 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 routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 selector 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 pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit 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 teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – 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