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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire 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 real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they exist in this space between confidence and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; 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 keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a major 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