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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm 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 alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time 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 isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she saw 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a notable 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