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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved 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 flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; 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 connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance 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 confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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