🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 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 feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments 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 female emancipation is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained 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 provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they live in this space between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing 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 keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup 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 quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny