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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian 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 off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended 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 following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking 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 notable 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