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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, 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 heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors 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 wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “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, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp 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 dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny