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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK 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 beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 women's liberation is viewed, which I believe 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 solid 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 kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘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 time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? 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 amazed that her story provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 worst-case scenario. My logic 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic 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, 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 quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny