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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire 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 wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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, chic, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic 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 extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic 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 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 bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable 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