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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving 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 lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, 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 ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny