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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial 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 kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “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, stylish, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up 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 high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, 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 circuit was shot through with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny