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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: 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 reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 single mother. “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, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “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 talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to 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 comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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