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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense 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. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser 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 all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra 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 infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran 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 type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away 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 liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about 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 absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have 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 told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny