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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they exist in this space between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 single mother. “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, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have 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 worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence 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 prestigious 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