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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed 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 true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; 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 pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they live in this area between confidence and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively community theater 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 driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 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, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 amazed that her anecdote caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – she won a major 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