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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” 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 don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: 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 had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this realm between pride and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

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, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew 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 bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny