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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. 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 wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

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 facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they live in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw 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 an alternate reality 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 turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance 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 comparable?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, 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 was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny