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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors 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 affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. 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 live there for a long time and have one another'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 first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 solo mom. “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, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 amazed that her story generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after 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 persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable 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