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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit 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 wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial 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 type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of 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 simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny