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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other 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 pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; 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 think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained 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 life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain 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 was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘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 Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement 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 linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, 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 informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware 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 plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated 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