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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty 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 trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis 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 youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; 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 thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (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 sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended 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 tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny