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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag 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 self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: 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 had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant 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 talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; 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 taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed 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 cracked open something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale 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 long life is, and how many things can transform. 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 chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – she won a prestigious 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