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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven 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 pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; 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 thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, 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 considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; 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 crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed 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 diagnosed 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 issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long 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 subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny