One Of 2026's Best Documentaries Will Change How You View A Legendary Flop
by BJ Colangelo · /FilmMost documentaries about "Saturday Night Live" are little more than glorified hype packages padded with nostalgic anecdotes and sanitized retellings, or, in the case of Jason Reitman's "Saturday Night," they're pop culture obsessions with the show's glory days. "Saturday Night Live" has produced 11 feature films based on some of its most popular sketches, and arguably the most infamous is the Julia Sweeney vehicle "It's Pat." Boasting a whopping 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, the film is based on the titular annoying, androgynous recurring sketch character that "Transparent" creator Jill Soloway once called an "awful piece of anti-trans propaganda." But whether or not Pat is among the worst sketches in "SNL" history is subjective, and filmmaker Ro Haber's documentary, "We Are Pat," uses one of the most divisive comedy characters of the last 40 years as a way into thornier questions about gender, authorship, reclamation, and the uncomfortable afterlife of pop culture.
"We Are Pat" holds up the character as a Rorschach test, asking us to decide if the joke was always on panicky cis people short-circuiting over their inability to clock Pat's "actual" gender, or if they were laughing at the mere existence of a "type" of person they already found disturbing. The film wisely invites us to hold both beliefs simultaneously. As comedian River Butcher rightfully explains:
"It is transphobic, it is very funny, and Pat is a non-binary icon. Can we not acknowledge that all three of these statements are true at once?"
Haber structures the documentary around conversations with trans and gender-nonconforming comedians, whose responses range from affection to discomfort to outright admiration. Haber refuses to flatten those perspectives into consensus, resulting in a fascinating discussion about coding, projection, and the limits of reclamation. What can marginalized communities reclaim from works that were used against them? Is there value in trying? The documentary never pretends there's an easy answer.
Julia Sweeney remains a national treasure
Comedians in our current era often respond to criticism by digging in their heels, but Julia Sweeney is refreshingly open to dissecting Pat, both as a cultural artifact and as an extension of her own feelings about gender presentation. She transparently wrestles with the possibility that a character born of her own frustrations with the rigid gender expectations of women in the entertainment industry — and from trying to survive an overwhelmingly male writers' room at "SNL" — could have reinforced harmful, transphobic assumptions, even if unintentionally.
Between the interviews, Haber assembles an all-trans comedy writers' room to see if jokes featuring Pat could exist in our current era. Watching them interrogate every aspect of the character and discover which elements still have comic potential is occasionally profound, but it also allows the audience to see comedians simply showing off how funny they are, which is something viewers who aren't already immersed in the queer comedy scene are likely unfamiliar with. At one point, Sweeney visits the writers' room to meet the comedians and talk more about the intentionality behind Pat, who originally imagined the character as someone perfectly comfortable with their own identity while everyone else unraveled trying to categorize them. But over time, Pat escaped that definition.
At one point, Sweeney is working with comedian Grace Freud — who, make no mistake, is one of the funniest comedians currently working today — on how to properly nail Pat's physical mannerisms. It's the type of passing of the torch that you'd see in an underdog sports movie, but to see it lovingly exist between a comedy legend who created a character that has indirectly contributed to a culture that makes the world more hostile for people like Freud? That's cinema, baby.
We Are Pat is a rich conversation about comedy
Plenty of pop culture documentaries excavate forgotten artifacts, but Ro Haber's film asks us to do an archaeological dig on ourselves instead. Why do we think people found Pat funny enough to turn them into an icon? Why are people still laughing, or why have they stopped? And what do the answers to all of these questions reveal about identity, memory, nostalgia, and comedy itself? By the end of the documentary, you'll be considering not just your relationship with the stuff that made you laugh in your younger years, but also the strange relationship between creators and the meaning audiences project onto their work.
Believe it or not, "We Are Pat" is one of the richest conversations about comedy ever documented. I'll admit I went home and immediately re-watched "It's Pat" for the first time in probably 20 years to assess how my own relationship with the character has changed. For many viewers, cisgender and transgender alike, Pat represented the first glimpse of gender nonconformity they'd ever encountered. Regardless of how clumsy or accidental the character may have been, that history can't be ignored. We can't go back in time and act as if a piece of art wasn't highly influential, regardless of how problematic it may be (my transgender wife and I wrote a book about "Sleepaway Camp," for crying out loud).
And like all of the best conversations about "art that has aged badly," the documentary has no interest in telling people how to feel about "It's Pat," the movie, or the sketches Julia Sweeney created. Instead, "We Are Pat" serves as a facilitator for conversations about growing up surrounded by media that can't imagine people who exist beyond fodder for punchlines and how that impacts us all decades later.
"We Are Pat" is available on VOD.