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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts 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 artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality 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 partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

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 had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close 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 recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny