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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off 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 maternal love while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

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 youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, 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 gets to the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper 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 considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit 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 traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references 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 not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed 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 told you have something – I was quite ill 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 haven’t split up 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 following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny