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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-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 distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required 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 flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident 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 off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant 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 lose weight, 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 addresses the heart of how feminism is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return 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 teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt 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 jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny