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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; 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 off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; 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 prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, 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, actions and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? 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, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? 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 amazed that her story provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, 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 told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny