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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. 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 alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people 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 keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another'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 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 amazed that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny