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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: 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 undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, 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 experiences, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 darkest possibility. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into 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 belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – 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