🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer 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 afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: 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 received treatments; 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 core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me 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 solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit 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 teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

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 a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “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 mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 shocked that her story caused outrage – she was fond of 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 outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance 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 similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly 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, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell 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 split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny