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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive 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 trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; 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 kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. 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 link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. 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 inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

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, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware 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 bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny