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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved 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 close to 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 see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie 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 wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained 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 controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, 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 Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. 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 chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking 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 was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny