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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 come along 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 flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, 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 gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay 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 spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her story caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through 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