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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic 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 won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential 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 emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. 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 bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant 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 bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity 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. “Certain people 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. 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 parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry 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