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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-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 won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. 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. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser 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 deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this space between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out 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 one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, 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 statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a major 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