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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes 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 significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, 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 core of how feminism is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; 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 feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny