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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child 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 lose weight, well, there are treatments 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 heart of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper 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 while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this area between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. 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 bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. 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 inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny