Pat (Saturday Night Live)
Pat O'Neill Riley is an androgynous fictional character[1] created and performed by Julia Sweeney for the American sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) from 1990 to 1994.[2] The character was later featured in the film It's Pat. The central humorous aspect of sketches featuring Pat is the inability of others to determine the character's sex.
Pat
Background[edit]
Sweeney has said, "I'd been an accountant for like five years, and there was one person I worked with in particular who had a lot of mannerisms like Pat. This person sort of drooled and had the kind of body language of Pat. I started trying to do him. I was testing it out on my friends and they were just like, 'Yeah, it's good, but it doesn't seem like a guy that much.' Like I couldn't quite pull off being in drag convincingly enough. So then I thought, maybe that's the joke. I'll just have one joke in here about how we don't know if that's a man or a woman just to sort of cover up for my lack of ability to really play a guy convincingly."[3]
Physical appearance[edit]
Pat O'Neill Riley is fat, has short, curly black hair, and wears thick glasses. Pat typically wears a light-blue pearl-snap Western-style shirt with tan slacks.
In creating the character, actress Sweeney colored her lips beige, and colored in her eyebrows, to create the character's sex-ambiguous appearance.
Pat's sex[edit]
The character has been described as "hermaphroditic" in the book The Guide to United States Popular Culture.[2] The book Creating Contexts for Learning and Self-authorship: Constructive-developmental Pedagogy, states that the character's "gender is never revealed".[20] Sweeney herself has not confirmed Pat's sex and denies that Pat is transgender.[21]
Norm Macdonald said that after he joined the show, on the night the cast watched the debut of Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Farley "said 'I gotta tell you a secret about SNL' ... He secreted me into this room, he locked it, made sure it wasn't bugged and everything ... I was very honored to have this. And then his secret was, he said, 'This doesn't go past these walls. Pat…IS A WOMAN!'"[22]