Pat

Pat O'Neill Riley is an androgynous fictional character created and performed by Julia Sweeney for the American sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) from 1990 to 1994. The character was 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 sex. Background 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." Physical appearance Pat O'Neill Riley is fat, has short, curly black hair, and wears thick glasses. Pat typically wears a light-blue pearl-snap 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 sex-ambiguous appearance.