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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains 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 human as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser 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 took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with 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 bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape 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 nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: 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, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements 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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long 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 following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit 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 established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny