🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. 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 connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial 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 kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up 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, chic, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 amazed that her story caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell 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 alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny