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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure 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 discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time 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 teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 raised 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, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired 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 violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements 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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, 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 sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was permeated 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny