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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian 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 gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “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 imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra 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 facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; 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 feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 story generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into 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 confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny