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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty 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 norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner 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 pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile 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 heart of how feminism is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between pride and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 shocked that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent 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 linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, 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 ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was shot through 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