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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive 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 while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “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 mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – 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