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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another'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 first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

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 controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret 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 alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny