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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required 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 made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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 describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition 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 while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they exist in this space between pride and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors 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 metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, 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 enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – 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 mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 shocked that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp 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 comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy 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 belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny