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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other 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 pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 content to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s 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 first love? She returned 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape 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 loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “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 performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny