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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality 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 significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

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 profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, 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 life events, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny