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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential 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 underlying theme to that is an focus 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 young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny