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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, 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 loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew 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 knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny