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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love 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 pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they live in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with 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 feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for 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 winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny