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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat 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 facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they exist in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 raised until then as a single mother. “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 cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “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 performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated 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 instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny