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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with 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 feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her anecdote generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a prestigious 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