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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, 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 feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness 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 said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this space between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Abuse? Transaction? 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 meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, 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 linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 change. But at 23, I was unaware.” 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 care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny