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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, 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 gets to 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 never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they live in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. 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 link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door 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 spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she went out with 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny