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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit 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 traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed 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? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “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 equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a notable 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