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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips 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 project maternal love while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage 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 true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 pests 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, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in 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 belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny