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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker 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 nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme 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 facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they reside in this area between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 raised 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, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, 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 remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying 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 plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny