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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, 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 stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' 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 teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? 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 amazed that her anecdote caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny