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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, 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 gets to the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they live in this area between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

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 controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets 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? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 problems, 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny