🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person 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 fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she saw 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 single mother. “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, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; 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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” 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 care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny