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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors 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 notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay 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 she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? 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 shocked that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission 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 linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny