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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” 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 removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

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 lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 fellatio sequence caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 ups and downs, if we are still together 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 next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – 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