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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: 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 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 feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained 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 realm between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick 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 haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after 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 being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit 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 created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny