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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required 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 flawed as a mother, as a partner 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 took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they live in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “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, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed 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? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” 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 conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny