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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker 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 deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme 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 youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known 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 her former partner, 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her story caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

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, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny