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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “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, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny