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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other 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 deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained 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 personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “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, stylish, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny