🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 explains breezily: “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 human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, 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 gets to the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a active 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 driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? 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 shocked that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated 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 instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long 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 white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a major 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