🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove 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, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, 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 live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? 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 expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was told she had 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 diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 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 time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – she won a notable 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