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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ 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 simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 mother, as a significant other and as a selector 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 took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis 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 had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied 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 maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; 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 keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she saw 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 lone parent. “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, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away 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 enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 issues, 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt 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 simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny