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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-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 annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm 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 alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person 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 afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper 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 speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (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 performances 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? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 shocked 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 strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny