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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: 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 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 addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness 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 speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 violated so many boundaries – 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 certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was instantly 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 difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – 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