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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid 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 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 jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they exist in this space between confidence and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. 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 stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions 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 mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance 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 bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny