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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. 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 off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 human as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie 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 jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, 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 gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable 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 late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she went out with 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, 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 performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent 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 comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance 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 faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny