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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ 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, 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse 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 entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme 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 facial structure of a youth, 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 feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘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 another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a major 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