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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie 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 wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications 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 root of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape 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 found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 issues, 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 didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny