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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby 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 slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back 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 returned to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for 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, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate 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, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny