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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme 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 facial structure of a youth, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; 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 eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety 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. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny