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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required 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 nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear 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 material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is conceived, which I believe 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 God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she went out with 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 another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (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 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? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had 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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny