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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire 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 routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a selector 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 whole 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 true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, 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 core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained 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 challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; 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 eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another'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 traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided 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 can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 fellatio sequence generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – she won a major 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