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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 brought up 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, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

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 discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “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 routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – 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