Today we’d like to introduce you to Meg Ryan.
Meg, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I grew up as a mainstreamed special ed student and developed a sense of humor as a means to cope with that reality very young. When I began college, I excelled academically but was always wary of entertainment even though my sense of humor and creativity are my defining personality characteristics. I ended up studying writing and producing television at Columbia College Chicago and moved to Los Angeles after graduation. I became pregnant within a few months and it seemed impossible to continue chasing a career in comedy at 22 with a baby on the way and no stable income. I left Los Angeles for the midwest, a sensible place to raise a baby.
The next few years were fucking hard. I mistakenly believed I had to give up a huge part of my identity, including my need to create, in order to raise my family. Being a new mother at 23 was a very isolating experience, it sometimes felt as though I completely lost my autonomy, and all of my personal passions were superseded by my responsibilities as a parent. I had no outlet to direct my ennui.
Fast forward several years of feeling this way, one day I remember having the very conscious thought of, “wait a second, this is stupid. I still have shit to say.” I enrolled in comedy classes all over Chicago to get my sea legs back and while it scared the shit out of me, it also gave me a sense of self once more. After several years of putting up shows and developing my voice, I moved myself and my family back to Los Angeles and dove into the Los Angeles comedy scene head first as a now unabashed young mother of two who wasn’t afraid to make cum jokes.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I’m much more of a writer than a performer and I relish in the realness of live sketch comedy. There’s something very sexy to me about seeing your work on stage in front of a bunch of strangers and getting them to laugh. My deepest desire is to find a way into writing multi-cam sitcoms.
My particular brand of humor changes by the day: be it silly, dark, or (I hope only) mildly antagonistic; though always at least a little bit horny. I like to play with various societal foibles, particularly when it comes to gender. Being a single mom with a raunchy sense of humor seems to catch people off-guard, and I enjoy screwing with peoples’ expectations.
My goal for any of my work is to get people asking, “oh, is that commonly held belief or idea we’ve all agreed is fine for some reason really okay? And why did it take me so long to question that?” but more often than not people go, “that was pretty weird” and honestly, I’ll take what I can get.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t give a lot of credit to my kids for developing my comedic voice. Being their mom has completely informed my view of the world in a way no other life experience has.
Given everything that is going on in the world today, do you think the role of artists has changed? How do local, national or international events and issues affect your art?
I have always felt it was the job of comedians, and artists in general, to hold a mirror up to society, raising doubts about whether or not the general public as a whole is doing a-okay.
I don’t think the role of the artist has changed, but I do believe the need to create and create loudly has become more important, as the rest of the world has gotten pretty noisy.
I love to make a joke out of authority behaving badly on any level, so if nothing else, there has been a lot more naturally absurd material for me to draw my work from in the last few years. While can be hard to find the humor in a lot of what happens on a daily basis, to me that proves why the role of comedians is so important.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
My writing is featured in various comedy venues around Los Angeles. A lot of these only go up one time, but here’s a playlist of some of my more popular sketches: https://bit.ly/2HQ7xRn.
I write for Top Story! Weekly! The longest running live sketch comedy show in Los Angeles, which has a new show every Sunday at 8 pm at Acme NoHo. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/topstoryweekly
I also have several new projects and performance opportunities in the works at Second City Hollywood and the Clubhouse.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
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Facebook: TheMegRyan32
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Instagram: The_Meg_Ryan
Image Credit:
Sam Kimbrell, Margaret Maurer, Anna Rubanova
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