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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential 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 unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: 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 drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained 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 controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions 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 brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny