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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they exist in this space between pride and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy 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 didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? 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 provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – 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