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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they reside in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. 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 bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 amazed that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic 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, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. 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 take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny