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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return 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 returned to Sarnia, caught up 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 solo mom. “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, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – 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 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 deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny