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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required 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 imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments 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 root of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny