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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear 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 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 medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 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, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? 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 meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused anger – 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 consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny