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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; 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 alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell 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 feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she went out with 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to 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 make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – 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