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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, 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. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold 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 off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; 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 breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic 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 change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene 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 established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny