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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer 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 bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic 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 felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – she won a notable 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