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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ 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 summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra 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 child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs 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 core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing 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 expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, 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 realm between confidence and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed 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? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments 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 comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, 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 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 haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny