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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out 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 long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? 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 amazed that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 most negative outcome. 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny