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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. 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 bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? 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 shocked that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 reasoning 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for 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 faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny