🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born 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 forming coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. 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 link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed 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 absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to 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 make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable 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