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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required 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 lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they exist in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 single mother. “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, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her story provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand 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. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have 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 told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended 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 next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny