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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer 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 wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this area between confidence and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell 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 bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' 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 returned to Sarnia, met again 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘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 time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – 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 weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying 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 plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny