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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “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 human as a parent, as a partner 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 deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed 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 considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 surprised that her story 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 consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a major 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