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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

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 controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 fellatio sequence caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny