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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 human as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser 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 deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness 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 controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

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 another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 story provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable 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