🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 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 deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between confidence and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant community theater 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 perfectionist. She wanted to escape 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 remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled 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 cared for 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, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (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 performances 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? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her story caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup 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 belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – 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