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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp 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. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny