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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure 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 reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this area between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; 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 view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back 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 teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up 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 cared for 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, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 amazed that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with 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 performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny