‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, 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 viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering 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 happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit 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 high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 lone parent. “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, chic, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her anecdote generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter 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 comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
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