Pat (Saturday Night Live)

Pat
Saturday Night Live character
First appearance	Saturday Night Live
Last appearance	It's Pat
Portrayed by	Julia Sweeney
Information
Gender	Unknown
Occupation	Various
Nationality	American

Pat is an androgynous fictional character created and performed by Julia Sweeney for the American sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, and 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 gender. Pat was revealed to be a woman by Norm MacDonald during an appearance on CONAN on 17 November 2016.

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."

Pat O'Neill Riley is fat, has short, curly black hair, and wears thick glasses. Pat typically wears a blue 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 gender-ambiguous appearance.

Pat is socially awkward, to the point of impairment. Pat speaks in a nasal voice which is much louder than everyone else's around Pat. Pat often end sentences by making a strange whimpering, giggling, or 'thought-in-process' sound. Pat apparently has very sweaty palms, and is constantly wiping them on clothing, as if to dry them. The other characters are generally sympathetic, and attempt to include Pat in conversations or activities. An exception to this is when Pat speaks of sexual and romantic interests, to which other characters react with disgust or, at least, disinterest.

The sketches always revolve around the gag of Pat's unrevealed gender: the name "Pat" can be short for "", a female name, or "Patrick", a male name. The celebrity guests on the show play everyday people who encounter Pat, and who then try to discern Pat's gender, without being so rude as to actually ask outright. Pat remains oblivious, and endlessly frustrates the questioners with answers that leave Pat's gender vague.

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