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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline 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 female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial 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 challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they exist in this space between confidence and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit 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 first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape 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 liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? 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 shocked that her anecdote generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended 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 next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew 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 bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny