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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-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 annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out 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 stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood 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 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? 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 anecdote generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had 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 sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny