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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “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 imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat 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 challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty 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 active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back 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 cared for 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, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – 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