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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable 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 succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they live in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her anecdote generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, 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 being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny