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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend 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 off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 imperfect as a mother, as a spouse 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 pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message 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 jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 amazed that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware 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, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious 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