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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

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 advocate for equality and have a boob job 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 selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby 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 medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation 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 male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between pride and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased 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 isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she went out with 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, 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 nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets 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? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

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 informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew 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 simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny