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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed 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 summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality 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 spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, 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 gets to the core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an technical 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 sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she was fond of 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 performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny