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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave 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 venue (except this is a myth: “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 discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? 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 shocked that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious 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