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‘Especially in this country, I feel 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 almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, 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 addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – 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 absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny