🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie 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 material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message 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 facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; 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 reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing 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 eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable 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 Bobby Kootstra, 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 another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

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

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked 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 outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 worst-case scenario. My rationale 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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