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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the 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 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 drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable 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 succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live 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 grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she dated 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 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, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? 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 shocked that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, 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 statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny