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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; 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 unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; 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 eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘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 period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny