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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic 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 won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful 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 that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire 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 comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications 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 feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, 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 exist in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? 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 weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “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 comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith 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 bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny