‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person 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 afraid of men, but is bold 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 unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: 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 received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (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 routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her anecdote provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware 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 simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
