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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 performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “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 stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she went out with 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘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 a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “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 performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny