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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed 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 slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she saw 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, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. 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 venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates 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 references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew 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, 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious 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