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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, 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 addresses the root of how feminism is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition 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 sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell 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 notably wealthy or urban and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. 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 live 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 was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she saw 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave 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 debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “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 discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking 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 performance 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny