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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed 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 long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back 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 raised 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, chic, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (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 sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware 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 simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny