Add We Are Pat to Peacock’s growing archive of Saturday Night Live-adjacent content. But unlike the bevy of lightweight retrospectives and not-particularly-revealing profiles of Lorne Michaels, this new documentary addresses the fraught social discourse surrounding one of the show’s most popular characters. Director Ro Haber digs deep into Julia Sweeney’s androgynous character Pat, who was a non-binary individual with they/them pronouns decades before such terminology even existed. The hit sketch frequently revolved around other characters’ attempts to discern whether Pat was male or female, and soon spawned a box-office flop of a feature-length spinoff, It’s Pat: The Movie. The cultural ubiquity of the character leaves members of the queer community wrestling with whether Pat is an icon or an offensive stereotype — and the answer to that question may be in the eye of the beholder.
WE ARE PAT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: In case you’re not familiar with Pat: They — and the participants in this documentary insist Pat is a “they,” although there’s a funny slip-up in which they’re gendered as “he” — were a character on SNL in the early 1990s. Sweeney donned a tight-curl wig and big dorky glasses, and pulled an ugly Western shirt and unflattering khakis over a modestly puffy fat suit. Pat was incredibly, well, weird. They spoke in an elongated nasal whine, face scrunched up, drool dripping from grimacing lips. Yes, drool. The skits put Pat in everyday situations in which other characters were baffled by their presence. People tied themselves into knots trying to discern whether Pat was male or female, but Pat inevitably deflected the attempts, forever maintaining the frustrating ambiguity.
Thirty-odd years later, transgender filmmaker Haber has amassed a collection of vintage Pat paraphernalia, fascinated by this cultural artifact. Have the years been kind to Pat? Are they still funny? Is it time to declare them a queer icon? Or do they need to be “reclaimed” first? To tackle these questions, Haber assembles a de-facto “writer’s room” of queer comedians, including Brontez Purnell, Murray Hill, Ally Beardsley, and several others. They ponder the politics of Pat, wonder if Pat is actually neurodivergent, debate whether Pat is or ever was funny. They piece together Pat sketches within a modern context — say, a visit with a doctor who’s sensitive to nonbinary people, but still flummoxed by Pat — and wear Pat costumes so they can perform them for the doc. Meanwhile, Haber nails down interviews with Sweeney, who discusses her thought process behind the creation of Pat, and does some pondering herself about the impact and legacy of the character.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Hari Kondabolu’s doc The Problem with Apu addressed the troublesome Indian-stereotype character from The Simpsons in a similarly analytical fashion.
Performance Worth Watching: Well, the comics Haber puts in front of their camera are unabashedly funny — e.g., Purnell, who quips, “I don’t want to know Pat’s gender — I just want them to have a better outfit.”
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: Is We Are Pat a reckoning? Was a reckoning even needed? Haber, as they do with almost every problematic Pat-related point brought up in the film, doesn’t answer these questions definitively — likely because there are none. Interviewee River Butcher puts it perfectly, saying Pat is transphobic, and funny, and an icon. “Can we not acknowledge that all three of these statements are true at once?” they ask. Which means We Are Pat is a fascinating examination of pop-cultural ephemera swamped in cognitive dissonance.
The quasi-panel of funny people Haber assembles for the doc offer an array of perspectives poking at larger conversations, e.g.: What comedy was in the ’90s, is now in the 2020s, and can be in the future; also, what should we think about when we find ourselves in the portion of the Venn diagram where comedy and insensitivity overlap? The interviews with Sweeney are fascinating. She seems uneasy at first, but is never less than willing to earnestly engage with the other doc participants. She shares that she was “thinking widely, not deeply” when she created Pat, adding that frustration with the male-dominated SNL writer’s room tendency to squeeze out female voices prompted her to create a character who was neither gender.
Such insights add wrinkles to a narrative that finds Haber wisely opting for subtlety and nuance over generalized statements of praise or condemnation. Which is a way of saying the discourse surrounding Pat is just like Pat themself – fraught with uncertainty. That in itself is apt, funny and maybe a little ironic.
Our Call: We Are Pat is a thoughtful intellectual wrestling match framed as a documentary. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.