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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ 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 explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable 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 prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating 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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, 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 informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic 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 didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense 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, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny