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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications 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 feminism is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? 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 shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have 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 informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny