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‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal 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 attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian 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 fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the 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 feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close 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 didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines 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? 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 expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny