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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a picker 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 all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets 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? 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 definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny