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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; 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 drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: 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 drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape 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 live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (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 sets 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? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt 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 knew I had comedy.” 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 created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny