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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery 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 picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole 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 true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, 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 feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands 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 challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? 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 surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments 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 comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic 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, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “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 conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny