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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering 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 close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return 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 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 raised 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, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed 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? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny