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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 picker 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 whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme 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 young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny