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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required 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 parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to 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 being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they live in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny