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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive 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 talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they live in this area between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 brought up 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, stylish, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (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 routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, 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 transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny