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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic 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 gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained 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 controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; 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 view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan 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 vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby 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 was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (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 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? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand 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 alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking 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 standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt 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 bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny