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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian 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 avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 imperfect as a parent, as a significant other 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 whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, 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 life events, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 most negative outcome. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup 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 sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny