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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive 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 opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed 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 party-goer 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 wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: 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 received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they live in this space between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a lively community theater arts 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 longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up 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, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, 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 Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her story caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “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 material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had 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 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing 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 simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny