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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 parent, as a spouse and as a chooser 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 nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications 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 core of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people 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 thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known 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, 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, 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 debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, 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. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense 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 being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny