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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer 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 fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 addresses the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny