🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: 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 undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town 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 spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Abuse? 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 absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit 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 established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny