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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty 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 norm to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant 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 being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's 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 first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life 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 turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent 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 linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny