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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an focus 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they exist in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering 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 next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny