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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, 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 gets to the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. 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 spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar 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 an old flame, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a lone parent. “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, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? 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 definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments 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 references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny