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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 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 afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child 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 reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to 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 pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, 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 next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up 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, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 worst-case scenario. 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – 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