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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘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 Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement 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 statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 reasoning 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 couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny