🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ 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 simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality 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 partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis 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 young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking 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 come 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – she won a major 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