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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic 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 personal stories, choices and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. 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 link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 ups and downs, 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 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 parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” 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 established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny