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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other 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 unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, 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 women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing 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 sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene 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