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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. 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 off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby 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 medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. 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 bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood 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 saw 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, 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 take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? 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 absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, 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 most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny