🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between pride and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime 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 didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 shocked that her anecdote provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny