🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off 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 crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid 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 underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby 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 treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed 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 considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they live in this area between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “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, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny