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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, 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 touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen 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 vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back 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 returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated 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 disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick 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 are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny