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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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 summarises casually: “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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect 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 went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; 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 eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she saw 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, 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 persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny