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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist 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 avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality 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 picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance arts 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 sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit 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, caught up with 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” 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 look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny