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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes 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 radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications 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 core of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; 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? Transaction? 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 surprised that her story caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt 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 simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny