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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme 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 profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back 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 first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we are always connected to 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 Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny