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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing 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 supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this space between confidence and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

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 a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? 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 provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

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, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny