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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured 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 little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; 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 gets to the core of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought 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 demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; 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 feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. 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 an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 amazed that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny