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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector 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 performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned 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 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 return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had 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 unwell 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 alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious 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