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‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, 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 advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; 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 thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, 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 long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw 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 avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. 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 topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed 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 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 revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance 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 confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – 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