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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress 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 comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser 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 pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, 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 feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, 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 next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 amazed that her story provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

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 told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny