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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm 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 off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold 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 off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications 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 women's liberation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay 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 spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for 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, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, 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 loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny