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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought 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 awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a lone parent. “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, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause 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 be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable 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