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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 flawed 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 slag them off; 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 off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: 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 undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs 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 core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought 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 late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime 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 first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 brought up 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, chic, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance 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 dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup 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 faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny