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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie 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 child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments 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 viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 single mother. “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, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? 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 shocked that her story caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny