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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector 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 entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about 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? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, 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 ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious 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