🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” 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 glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect 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 criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, 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 gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever 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 modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; 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 thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, 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 live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny