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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required 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 human as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

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 profile 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, 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 close to their parents and live there for a long time 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 teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she went out with 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 single mother. “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, chic, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired 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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking 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 relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

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 told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing 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 simply, “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 established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny