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‘Especially in this place, 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 humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion 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 off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 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 deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “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 routines where she discussed 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? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward 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 brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have 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 diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for 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 persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny