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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “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 slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable 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 demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this area between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with 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 view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 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, chic, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about 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? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance 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 belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a notable 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