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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby 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 lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. 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 sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 rationale 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 lengthy 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 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 enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny