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‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home 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 annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they reside in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she saw 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? 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 surprised that her story caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. 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 classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a major 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