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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear 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 routines, which she describes breezily: “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 slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; 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 consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is understood, 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 avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, 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 life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, 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 nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story 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 demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny