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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “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 flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

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

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 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, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny