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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. 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. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message 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 had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. 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 connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny