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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding 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 expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained 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 controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving 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 remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious 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