🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential 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 real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile 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 consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 problems, if we haven’t split up 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a major 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