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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, 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 cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, 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 addresses the root of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; 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 bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this space between pride and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? 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 story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, 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 sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense 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 being convincing, 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 scene was shot through with discrimination – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny