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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist 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 significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain 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 was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her anecdote caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny