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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, 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 core 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 universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss 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 thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 solo mom. “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, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in 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 faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny