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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing 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 exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: 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 lose weight, 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 gets to the core of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid 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 demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “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 cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (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 performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed 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 ill 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 are still together 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 high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, 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 industry was riddled 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny