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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

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 profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they exist in this space between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 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, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 rationale 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for 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 winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – 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