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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 human as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, 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 gets to the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. 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 link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 darkest possibility. My rationale 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 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 tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny