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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence 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 youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 heart of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached 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 definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement 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. “Certain people 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious 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