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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained 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 provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had 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 sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny