🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear 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 routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they live in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell 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 connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? 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 amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed 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 told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny