🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

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 facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant 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 considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an technical 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 pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable 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, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, 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 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 dismissed 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – 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 definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity 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 different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 logic 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny