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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby 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 lose weight, 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 root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? 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 surprised that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny