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‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat 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 profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended 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 subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated 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