🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed 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 unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's 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 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “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, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – 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