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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit 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 liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident 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 emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling 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 supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this space between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 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, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny