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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse 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 pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, 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 gets to the root of how feminism is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out 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 lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back 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 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, stylish, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘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 time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 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 high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny