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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire 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 simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; 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 unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness 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 provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave 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 found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines 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? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period 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, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny