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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this space between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; 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 eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away 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 found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny