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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire 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 summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; 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 keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 worst-case scenario. 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 alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt 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 plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled 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