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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant 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 treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; 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 sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they live in this space between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return 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 teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity 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 different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt 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 was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny