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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared 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 wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “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 imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they live in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime 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 didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned 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? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill 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 transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a notable 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