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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared 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 routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, 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 fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny