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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus 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 youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in 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 feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled 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 lone parent. “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, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long 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 nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny