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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear 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 wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay 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 was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go 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 red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware 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 plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny