‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay 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 isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious 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
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