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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby 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 lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with 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 particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, 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 ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny