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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. 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 alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. 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 connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments 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 references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have 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 unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny