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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 imperfect as a parent, as a significant other 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 pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, 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, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between confidence and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went 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 cared for 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, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned 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? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand 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 dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor 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 prestigious 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