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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire 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 wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial 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 pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup 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 belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a notable 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