🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted 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 fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “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 little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated 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 hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

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

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – 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