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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse 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 performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

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 profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point 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 performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard 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 worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a major 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