🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. 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 off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured 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 alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up 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 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, 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 sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic 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 was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious 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