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‘Especially in this nation, I believe 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 almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, 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 addresses the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes 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 notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about 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? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny