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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains 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 chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town 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 familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw 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 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, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines 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? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 issues, if we haven't separated 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny