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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required 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 human as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, 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 personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance 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 distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together 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 white-knuckle 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 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 simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny