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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required 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 flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector 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 entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme 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 facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, 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 core of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never 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 coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘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 period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions 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 never have moved 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident 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, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny