🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; 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 bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? 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 amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a major 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