🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis 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 young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving 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 lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; 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 taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny