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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. 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 wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they reside in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (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 sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references 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 not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in retail, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – 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