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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 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, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates 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 equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in 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 performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny