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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they exist in this space between confidence and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable 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, reconnected with 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 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, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, 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 unwell 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 are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” 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 make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew 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 felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny