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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

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 debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, 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 statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated 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 hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had 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 diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious 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