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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend 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 reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured 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 alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – 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