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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, 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 addresses the core of how female emancipation is understood, 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 without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering 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 sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (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 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? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission 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 equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny