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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with 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 bullshitting, 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, choices and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking 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, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny