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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear 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 wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time 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 exist in this area between confidence and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done 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 are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking 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 plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious 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