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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift 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 brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the 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 feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape 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 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 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, 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 fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? 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 amazed that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, 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 comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – 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