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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other 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 pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: 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 undergone procedures; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained 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 experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; 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 feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup 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 sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny