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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector 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 entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence 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 young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they live in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; 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 keen 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 vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known 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, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 single mother. “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, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – 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