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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic 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 won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; 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 drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, 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 touches on the root of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable 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 succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close 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 known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “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 sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement 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 equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 reasoning 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 long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – 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