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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. 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 thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to 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 Hooters years, 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 misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious 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