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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human 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 slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought 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 late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people 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 feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent 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 one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

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 another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, 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 alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying 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 was confident I had material.” The whole industry 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 established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny