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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant 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 drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this space between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with 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 particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. 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 remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away 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 found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; 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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together 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 next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny