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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they live in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics 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 longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware 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 simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a notable 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