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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire 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 breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector 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 performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis 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 slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant 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 vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 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, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed 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 taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” 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 established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny