🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian 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 incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this space between confidence and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes 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 wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's 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 went back 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny