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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; 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 alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

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 discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 surprised that her anecdote caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity 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. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense 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 felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny