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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 breezily: “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 party-goer 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 afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing 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 meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, 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 nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into 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 confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny