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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. 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. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, 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 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 known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long 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 white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for 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 persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a notable 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