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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. 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. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell 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 view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny