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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; 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 off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained 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 challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they reside in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; 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 keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts 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 kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “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 talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. 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 classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware 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 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 created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny