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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold 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 alienating’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit 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 returned to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape 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 liked the job – in a establishment (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 boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? 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 amazed that her story caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing 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 material.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – 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