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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message 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 youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive 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 considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 cared for 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, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. 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 nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated 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 definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of 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 plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry 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 established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny