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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful 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 little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker 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 took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme 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 profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they exist in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in 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 view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out 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 was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she saw 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. 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 inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “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 references the comparison 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for 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 winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny