🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they exist in this area between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to 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 debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 anecdote caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny