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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability 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 authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. 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. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “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 parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole 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 emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable 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 thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they live in this space between pride and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 single mother. “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, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away 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 enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit 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 established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny