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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived 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 annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra 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 infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, 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 gets to the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

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 another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – 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 absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware 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 plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny