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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a picker 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 deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness 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 discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving 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 remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

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 discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets 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? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 fellatio sequence generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 couldn’t see it.” 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 care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny