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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear 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 summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; 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 keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back 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, reconnected with an old flame, 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “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, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 shocked that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp 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. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long 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 time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny