Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained 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 challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit 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 high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

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 an additional point 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 nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny