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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant 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 medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, 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 enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into 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 quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious 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