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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic 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 alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, 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 touches on the core of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, 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 meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy 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 familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘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 another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? 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 fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking 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 felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny