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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, 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. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile 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 consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, 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 loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny