🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes 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 parent, as a spouse and as a picker 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 deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme 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 youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, 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 addresses the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial 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 provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this space between confidence and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

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

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny