It’s Pat (1994) Review: Androgyny and the Need to Categorize

It’s Pat is not a good film; I’d just like to get that out of the way now. That said, it’s not without any merit. The film functions as a surprising portrayal of society’s reaction to androgyny. Its comedy depends upon the supposedly universal need to categorize another person as male or female. Pat’s appearance, voice, name, clothing, employment history, relationships, and mannerisms provide no satisfying answer. Nearly everyone Pat encounters responds by turning that uncertainty into a problem that must be solved.

The film occasionally finds something very funny in this obsession. I couldn’t help but laugh when Pat sang Aerosmith’s “Dude Looks Like a Lady” at karaoke, but those genuinely funny moments don’t come around as frequently as they should.

More often, the film simply repeats the same joke until the awkwardness loses its charm. Each scene introduces a new person who tries to determine Pat’s gender, only to have a carefully worded question answered in the least informative way possible. That structure could support a short sketch, as it did on Saturday Night Live. Stretched across a feature film, it feels like a collection of poorly considered setups waiting for some semblance of a story to form.

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It’s Pat (1994)

Based on Julia Sweeney’s recurring SNL character, It’s Pat follows Pat Riley, an abrasive and chronically unemployed person whose gender remains unknown to everyone around Pat, including the audience. Pat eventually meets Chris, played by Dave Foley, whose gender is equally indeterminate. They fall in love while Pat’s neighbor Kyle, played by Charles Rocket, becomes consumed with discovering what Pat “really” is.

The film initially struggles to generate anything resembling a narrative. Pat moves from one comic situation to another, usually behaving badly while someone searches for linguistic or physical evidence of gender. Jobs, medical appointments, family conversations, and social encounters exist primarily to prepare another variation of the same question. The plot finally takes shape during the second act, when Pat’s relationship with Chris develops, and Kyle’s curiosity escalates into stalking. Even then, the story remains so thin that it barely connects the sketches.

Even among a slew of mediocre Saturday Night Live films, It’s Pat is among the weakest I’ve seen. Its direction is flat, the supporting characters barely exist beyond their immediate function, and its comic rhythm grows numbing. The screenplay assumes that withholding the answer will become funnier each time. Instead, the repetition exposes how little material the filmmakers found beyond the original premise.

Pat is also deliberately unpleasant. Sweeney gives the character an abrasive voice, poor social instincts, boundless self-absorption, and a persistent disregard for other people’s discomfort. Some of this is essential to the character. Pat’s gender ambiguity is not supposed to be the only reason people find Pat difficult. Unfortunately, the film surrounds these personality traits with just enough spit, mucus, and phlegm to make the entire experience physically repulsive.

That grossness complicates any generous interpretation of the film’s gender politics. The comedy may ostensibly target the people who cannot tolerate Pat’s androgyny, but Pat is also coded as visually, socially, and physically undesirable. The audience is repeatedly encouraged to recoil. Julia Sweeney has since acknowledged that making Pat conventionally unattractive allowed viewers to associate androgyny with ugliness, even though that was not her intention.

Bad taste can be used deliberately to challenge the distinction between respectable and unacceptable bodies, as it is throughout John Waters’ confrontational approach to taste and obscenity. It’s Pat lacks that precision. Its bodily humor does not meaningfully challenge conventional beauty or decorum. It mostly provides another reason for the audience to reject a character already positioned outside ordinary gender expectations.

It’s Pat (1994)

Yet, there’s something almost admirable about Pat’s complete lack of interest in becoming legible. Pat never appears tormented by gender uncertainty and doesn’t treat other people’s confusion as a personal crisis. When someone asks a strategic question intended to reveal the truth, Pat answers sincerely without recognizing the trap. The joke depends upon Pat being oblivious, but that obliviousness also produces a strange kind of freedom, because Pat doesn’t owe anyone an answer.

This becomes especially apparent through Kyle. His obsession goes far beyond curiosity. He studies Pat, steals personal property, searches through private records, and eventually attempts to expose Pat’s body. Kyle’s behavior is absurd, but it also captures something unsettling about the love-hate relationship many cisgender men have with androgynous people.

For Kyle, attraction, disgust, competitiveness, and fascination become impossible to separate. He needs Pat to fit one category because his own reaction depends upon it. If Pat is a woman, his fascination may be interpreted as heterosexual desire. If Pat is a man, the same fascination threatens the identity Kyle assumes he possesses. Rather than question why another person’s body holds so much authority over his self-understanding, Kyle attempts to force the body to provide an answer. The uncertainty therefore belongs less to Pat than to him. Pat continues living while Kyle disintegrates.

This is where It’s Pat accidentally becomes more perceptive than its reputation suggests. Its real subject is not androgyny itself, but the panic produced when androgyny denies other people familiar social instructions. Clothing, language, attraction, marriage, and even casual conversation become difficult when someone cannot immediately be classified. Funnily enough, the film even belongs among those that make us question how identity is constructed, although it reaches that question through repetition and farce rather than sustained philosophical inquiry.

Categories help people navigate social life, but they also protect assumptions that might otherwise need to be examined. Kyle believes that knowing Pat’s gender will restore order. Other characters behave as though ordinary conversation cannot continue until the classification has been completed. Nobody asks why the answer matters so much. The need to know is accepted as natural, even when satisfying it requires deception, humiliation, or violence.

The film is at its funniest when it allows this need to become ridiculous. Kyle attempts to guess the password to Pat’s diary by entering every word in the dictionary. The sequence is absurdly prolonged, yet it works because his commitment is so disproportionate to the information he hopes to obtain. The appearance of Ween introduces another welcome element of surrealism, while Camille Paglia’s cameo briefly gives the film’s accidental gender theory a more explicit form.

It’s Pat (1994)

Chris also changes the premise in an important way. Pat finally encounters another person who cannot be easily categorized, but neither Pat nor Chris responds with panic. They fall in love, argue, separate, and reconcile without requiring the film to assign conventional gender roles to their relationship. Their compatibility has less to do with shared androgyny than with the absence of interrogation. For once, Pat is not being studied.

The relationship is too thinly written to carry the film emotionally, but its presence still counts for something. Pat and Chris are allowed a future together while Kyle’s obsession leaves him increasingly isolated. The people who appear most ridiculous are ultimately not the ones living outside familiar gender categories. They’re the people who cannot imagine intimacy, attraction, or social order without those categories.

That makes It’s Pat markedly different from films that use gender ambiguity primarily as a revelation or shock. In Sleepaway Camp, gender and the body become inseparable from the force of the ending. It’s Pat refuses the revelation altogether. The film repeatedly approaches an answer, sometimes through contrived physical exposure, before ensuring that neither Kyle nor the audience receives it.

This refusal is probably the most radical thing about the film. A conventional comedy would eventually reveal Pat’s gender and convert the preceding confusion into a final punchline. It’s Pat understands that such an answer would destroy the character. Pat can only continue to expose other people’s assumptions while remaining beyond their classifications.

None of this makes the film good. Its central insight emerges almost in spite of its writing. The jokes are frequently lazy, Pat’s characterization relies too heavily on disgust, and the narrative appears only after the film has already exhausted most of its premise. At 78 minutes, it still feels very padded.

Its reputation has nevertheless become more complicated. The documentary We Are Pat has helped reopen discussion of the character among transgender and nonbinary comedians, some of whom remember recognizing something valuable in Pat even when the surrounding culture used the character cruelly. Sweeney has also acknowledged both the harm associated with Pat and the original intention of making other people’s discomfort the joke. As Entertainment Weekly’s discussion of that reassessment explains, Pat can function simultaneously as an offensive caricature and an unusual figure of gender nonconformity.

That contradiction helps explain the film’s cult afterlife. It’s Pat has not endured because Pat receives a sensitive or particularly humane portrayal. Pat is selfish, irritating, and intentionally grotesque. The film endures because the reactions surrounding Pat have become more revealing with time. People lie, stalk, harass, and nearly lose their minds because they cannot fathom a person who doesn’t present a gender that accommodates mainstream expectations.

I cannot recommend It’s Pat as a successful comedy. Still, it contains enough moments of genuine absurdity to avoid being completely worthless. More importantly, its failed comedy preserves a recognizable social anxiety: the fear that another person’s refusal to fit a category might expose the instability of our own. Pat may be unbearable, but the people who believe they are entitled to classify Pat are considerably worse.