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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to 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 kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar 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, caught up 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “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, chic, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (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 talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt 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 simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” 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 conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny