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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme 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 facial structure of a youngster, 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 root of how feminism is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied 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 maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? 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 surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny