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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making 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 complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; 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 view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain 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 grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 issues, if we haven’t split up 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 following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny