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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. 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. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful 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 fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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 explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner 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 pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

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

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, 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 period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 diagnosed 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 issues, if we haven’t split up 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew 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 plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny