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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker 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 all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear 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 feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. 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 spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban 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 perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines 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? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy 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 faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny