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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period 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 she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 lone parent. “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, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

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 another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, 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 informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” 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 created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny