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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: 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 received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial 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 challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain 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 grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about 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? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, 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 comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable 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