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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

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 enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message 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 jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. 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 bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place 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 return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; 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 red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up 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 subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny