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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; 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 thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban 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 bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime 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 first love? She went back 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated 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 certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying 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 bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny