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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality 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 spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back 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, reconnected with her former partner, who she saw 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 solo mom. “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, stylish, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story 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 price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety 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. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny