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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “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 flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser 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 entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, 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 root of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I share 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 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 prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 most negative outcome. My rationale 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware 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 bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny