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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser 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 nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this area between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny