‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. 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 comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, 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 female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, 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 ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
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