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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 gets to the heart of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they reside in this space between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with 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 especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a active 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 perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. 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 undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp 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. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny