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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 guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence 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 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 feminism is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this space between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘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 an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, 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 ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – 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