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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child 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 slim down, well, there are drugs 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 heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with 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 feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape 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 a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 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 change. 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 maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – 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