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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby 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 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 touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. 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 link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town 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 return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing 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 knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny