🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: 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 had tweakments; 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 gets to the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. 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 bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering 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 kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back 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, caught up with an old flame, 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

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

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 found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit 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 performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny