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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “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 imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back 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 went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, 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 period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand 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. “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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick 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 are still together 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 time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny