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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home 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 irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ 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, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist 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 chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful 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 underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid 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 thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, 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 life events, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; 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 sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – 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 anecdote caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard 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 unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny