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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence 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 undergone procedures; 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 gets to the root of how feminism is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great 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 modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for 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, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? 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 definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated 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 found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident 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 problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – 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