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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner 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 pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this area between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell 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 sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

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 liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 story caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated 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 instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up 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 following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny