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‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks 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 hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in 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 faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny