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‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker 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 all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe 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 solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected 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 considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in 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 feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob 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 definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, 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 sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny