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‘Especially in this country, I believe 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 comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing 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 thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay 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 grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; 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? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly 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 wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, 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 sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny