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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock 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 unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence 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 youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

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 liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny