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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire 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 wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist 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 spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “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 came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

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 found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; 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 taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, 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 worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter 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 belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny