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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. 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. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie 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 baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic 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 challenging all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 instantly broke.”

‘I knew 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, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny