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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie 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 baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they live in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. 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 keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny