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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape 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 stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? 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 amazed that her story caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard 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 rationale 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 transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny