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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” 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 performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant 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 slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; 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 relentlessness of modern economic 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 controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar 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, 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “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, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her story generated controversy – she was fond of 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 performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 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 chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny