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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis 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 youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they reside in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny