🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite 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 gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; 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 insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, 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 experiences, actions and mistakes, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her story caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly 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 hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny