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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; 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 view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned 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 raised 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, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking 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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny