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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit 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 comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: 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 undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they live in this space between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known 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, met again 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 story caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny