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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery 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 confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message 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 profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing 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 supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes 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 cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she went out with 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, 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 be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 logic 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – 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