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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: 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 reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out 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 long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of 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 persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny