🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed 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 impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to 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 another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, 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 informed about something – I was quite sick 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 split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for 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 sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny