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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive 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 surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. 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 connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned 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 lone parent. “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, stylish, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, 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 liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing 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 simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene 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 established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny