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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner 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 performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence 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 youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they live in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. 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 link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed 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? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 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 was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – 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