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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” 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. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared 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 describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 human as a parent, as a spouse 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 deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable 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 succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they live in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – 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 amazed that her anecdote provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill 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 transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – she won a major 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