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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured 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 off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 core of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper 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 said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' 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 high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘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 time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? 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 shocked that her anecdote caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – she won a notable 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