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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other 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 pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus 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 youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable 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 prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

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 discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? 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 amazed that her story provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, 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 knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny