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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this realm between pride and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door 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 recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 lone parent. “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, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? 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 surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy 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 sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny