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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing 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 particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? 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 amazed that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic 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 persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a prestigious 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