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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person 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 stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, 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. “They 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 suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – she won a major 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