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‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; 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 unappealing’

The drumbeat 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 youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. 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 link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out 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 each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate rigidity 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 abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references 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 not have come 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 instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 darkest possibility. My rationale 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny