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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted 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 radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs 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 heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “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 violated so many red lines – 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 weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed 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 told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was riddled 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny