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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation 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. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 human as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they reside in this space between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return 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 teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up 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, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? 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 shocked that her anecdote generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity 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 persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny