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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared 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 comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, 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 life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 solo mom. “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, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to 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 debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 anecdote generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

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, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance 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 sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny