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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” 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 irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty 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 trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence 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 drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her anecdote caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 diagnosed 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 ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a major 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