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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat 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 life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious 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