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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend 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, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is understood, 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 avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist 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 provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through 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