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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they reside in this space between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; 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 connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

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 debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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 red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated controversy – she got on with 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 demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking 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 plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a notable 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