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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the 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 infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

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 a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – 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 absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent 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 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 hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – 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