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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect 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 mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; 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 thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 single mother. “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, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny