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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage 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 true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape 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 live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale 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 transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny