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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required 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 imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence 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 young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, 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 gets to the core of how women's liberation is viewed, 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 never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained 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 provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between confidence and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure 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 standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny