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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic 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 errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; 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 view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for 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, chic, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave 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 enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated 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, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended 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 following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny