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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” 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 being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness 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 talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 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, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

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

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? 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 expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry 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 created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny