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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up 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 appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person 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 bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential 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 drumbeat 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 facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’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 teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

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, 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 haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny