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‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they live in this area between pride and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell 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 feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about 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? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny