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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an focus 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 youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “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, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. 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 venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? 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 surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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

‘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, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny