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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence 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 had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; 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 eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back 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 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, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – 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 performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, 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 told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance 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 quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny