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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: 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 lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps 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 metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' 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 teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for 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 cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 surprised that her anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew 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 bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated 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