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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to 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 maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back 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 went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny