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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear 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 profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking 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 coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people 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 keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny