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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 shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be 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 fashion to be humble. 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 comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice 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 drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; 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 feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back 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 traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, 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 ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a prestigious 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