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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, 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 experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. 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 bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 raised 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, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away 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 topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after 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 persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a major 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