We Are Pat

In the early 1990s, Saturday Night Live’s Julia Sweeney created one of the show’s most popular characters of the time in the recurring sketch “It’s Pat!” Awkward, androgynous, and often wearing a light-blue pearl-snap Western-style shirt with tan slacks, Pat was an enigma—and their gender, and questions around it, was the punchline of many a joke. Now, 35 years later, the gags feel out of date and even insulting, but queer filmmaker Rowan Haber presents a whimsical and complex interrogation of “Pat,” a figure to which Haber had always found themselves inextricably drawn.

Collaborating with queer and trans comedians as well as a game Julia Sweeney ready to revisit her creation, We Are Pat looks at the way Pat embodied trans and nonbinary identities at a moment when popular culture had yet to understand them. Through their own hilarious observations and funny recreations of the Pat sketches, Haber and their crew are able to find in Pat an unlikely hero, one that might be worth reclaiming as a symbol of empowerment.

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