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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear 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 wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag 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 self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline 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 look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive 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 surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about 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? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 story provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 told you have something – I was quite sick 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying 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 bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – 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