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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (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 discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? 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 meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware 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 simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny