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‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments 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 viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving 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 lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “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, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 breached so many boundaries – 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 surprised that her story generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent 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 comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic 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 was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny