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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant 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 trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse 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 whole time.’”

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

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 profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

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

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close 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 didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 amazed that her story provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions 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 comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, 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 reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – 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