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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie 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 child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. 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 link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape 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 inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny