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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress 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, 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; 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 sense it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 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, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny