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‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message 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 youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan 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 high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby 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 didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she saw 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

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 fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about 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? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew 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 was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny