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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. 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 glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content 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 recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

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, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry 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 conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny