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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to 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 bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; 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 connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave 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 found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking 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 felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable 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