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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, 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 experiences, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (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 performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy 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 material.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a prestigious 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