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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. 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 alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she went out with 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, 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 enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? 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 amazed that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, 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 mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated 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