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‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker 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 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 breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they reside in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period 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 winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny