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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

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 jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained 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, actions and mistakes, they reside in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with 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 link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' 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 went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny