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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 describes breezily: “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 promiscuous person 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 bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. 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 connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving 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 each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for 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, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed 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? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with 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 modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in 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 enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene 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 conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny