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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected 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 considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they exist in this space between confidence and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended 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 following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware 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 was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny