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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, 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 close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, 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 winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny