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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear 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 comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 party-goer 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 wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, 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 core of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition 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 sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny