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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, 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 gets to the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. 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 remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘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 another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised 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 price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 problems, if we are still together 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny