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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser 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 nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, 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 addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable 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 prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 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, stylish, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry 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 created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny