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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense 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. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. 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 remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines 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? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying 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 bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny