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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality 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 partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the 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 emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child 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 root of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving 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 considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? 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 generated outrage – 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 price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, 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 told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – she won a major 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