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‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist 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 missteps, they live in this space between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back 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 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, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny