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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job 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 chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 gets to the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven 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 pressure of current financial 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 experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period 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 returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

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

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic 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 felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a major 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