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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; 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 eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. 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 remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape 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 a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? 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 certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – she won a major 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