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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire 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 authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications 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 heart of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “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, chic, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 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 white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a notable 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