New Doc Explores How Julia Sweeney's ‘SNL' Favorite Pat Became a Complex Nonbinary Icon

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Julia Sweeney's popular Saturday Night Live character Pat gets their plaudits (and some criticism) as a gender non-conforming pioneer in a new clip from the upcoming documentary, We Are Pat, premiering exclusively on Rolling Stone.
Sweeney played Pat throughout her run on SNL in the early Nineties and even got to star in a spin-off film, It's Pat. The inscrutability of Pat's androgyny was pushed to comedic extremes, effectively offering prominent, yet thorny representation for gender non-conforming people on television long before the term 'nonbinary' was being widely used.
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We Are Pat director Ro Haber tells Rolling Stone in an email they 'wanted to make a film about transness that had humor at the heart of it,' and kept coming back to their complicated feelings about Pat.
'Why am I laughing at something that's meant to laugh at me? Why do I love Pat? Is Pat a nonbinary icon or a transphobic trope of yesteryear?' Haber continues. 'In exploring these questions, it was really important that the film embraced a spirit of curiosity and conversation rather than cancel culture and judgment.'
The new clip opens with Karam Ann, a professor of TV studies, noting the prescience of Pat and how the relatively new discussion around nonbinary identity and the use of they/them pronouns has 'reanimated Pat from the grave.'
Actor and filmmaker River Gallo, who is nonbinary, adds, 'What's interesting to me about being nonbinary, and the definition of nonbinariness, is it's saying you're not these two things. It's not really definable but only by what it isn't. It's interesting thinking of Pat in those ways.'
We Are Pat will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, June 8. It's set to feature interviews with an array of queer and trans comedians and writers, including Molly Kearney, Esther Fallick, Abby McEnany, Pink Foxx, and Roz Hernandez. Sweeney also partook in the film, as did her SNL co-star Kevin Nealon.
Haber says one of the most profound things they learned while making the film was from Sweeney, who created Pat while grappling with her 'own gendered pressure as a woman trying to make it in the Ninetes boys club of comedy and SNL.'
'Pat grew out of familial and societal expectations of femininity that were placed on Julia during that time, and Pat was something of an escape for her,' Haber says. 'In the film, she says, 'It was actually a joy to be Pat because I got to have a break from having to be a girl too.' That sense of reacting to a gender expectation placed on you felt really relatable to the comics in the film and me.'
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