🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie 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 feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this space between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? 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 shocked that her story generated 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 consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard 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 rationale 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny