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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit 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 routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: 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 had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with 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 view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a major 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