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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile 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 consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with 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 maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; 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 thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit 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 traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? 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 shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity 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. “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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny