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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish 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 norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they live in this area between pride and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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 red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny