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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector 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 whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant 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 lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. 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 spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s 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 first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 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, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, 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 informed about 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 separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny