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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, 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 burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 human as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs 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 viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought 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 modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door 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 spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 surprised that her story provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 darkest possibility. 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 transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt 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 bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny