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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist 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 annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser 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 deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence 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 undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled 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 single mother. “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, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape 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 debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (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 sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 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 subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup 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 confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny