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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 slag 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 slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 gets to the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and regret. It occurred, 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 confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering 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 sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny