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‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the 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 insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic 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 challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; 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 sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran 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 type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay 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 was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

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 enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through 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