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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage 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 material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant 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 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 addresses the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they live in this area between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point 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 topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance 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 belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious 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