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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser 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 entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear 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 breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, 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 root of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell 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 bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, 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 close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she saw 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny