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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed 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 lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie 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 infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time 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 teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 reasoning 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 change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” 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 established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny