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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job 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 selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating 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 come 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 suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny