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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis 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 undergone procedures; 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 understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return 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 high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of 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 being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – 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