🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. 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 routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus 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 had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. 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 private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave 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 debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny