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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole 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 had tweakments; if you want to slim down, 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 female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? 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 brought up 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, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? 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 shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended 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 white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, 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 scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny