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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful 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 underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with 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 kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. 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 bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape 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 found it fun – in a topless bar (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 routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter 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 belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – 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