🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – 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 definitely 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 wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 worst-case scenario. My logic 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 change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny