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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress 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 wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 human as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 lone parent. “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, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned 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? Prostitution? 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 caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety 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. “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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up 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 following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny