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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “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 parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis 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 youth, 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 core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? 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 surprised that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, 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 riddled with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny