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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy 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 recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance 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 perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby 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 was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks 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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, 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 challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a major 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