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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag 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 wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child 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 lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return 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 went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was riddled 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