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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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 simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector 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 pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs 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 viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away 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 enjoyed working – in a establishment (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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny