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‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish 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 self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat 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 had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 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, stylish, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. 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 inaccuracy: “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 sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

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 informed about 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 issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny