🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, 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 nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in 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 affluent or urban and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, 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 adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? 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 amazed that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates 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 brings up the linking of certain remarks 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

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, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long 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 nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after 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 persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny