🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child 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 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 touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they live in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny