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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid 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 underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence 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 lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, 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 live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she saw 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 another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her anecdote caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, 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 informed about 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 issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew 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 simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny