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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. 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 bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 surprised that her anecdote provoked 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 performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny