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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “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, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her story caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny