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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 addresses the root of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny