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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, 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 loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance 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 different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny