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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense 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. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and live 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 isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape 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 loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long 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 next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, 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 was aware 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 bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny