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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting 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 norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required 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 imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential 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 consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, 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 root of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic 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 experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. 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 bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘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 Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines 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? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up 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 not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny