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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a picker 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 all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition 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 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 challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they exist in this space between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed 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 diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a major 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