🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: 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 medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 sets where she mentioned 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? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission 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 comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed 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 logic 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny