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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: 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 feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial 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 talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny