Bottom Feeders: It’s Pat: The Movie.

Saturday Night Live has been around long enough to be a Grandparent if it was really slutty and didn’t teach its kids any better.  Its cultural impact cannot be measured except in Gillettes, which are also used to estimate the power of lasers.  That’s how fucking serious Saturday Night Live is about being important.  Anything with that sort of clout is bound to branch out into other mediums and movies are the most logical place for SNL to branch to.  The great thing about it is that with such large casts and so many recurring characters, there’s no shortage of material to choose from.  The bad thing about it is that all those characters are designed be funny doing one specific thing for a very short period of time.

That means there are two kinds of SNL movies.  There are the ones that take a simple character and develop it, creating a more well rounded protagonist that translates better to the big screen.  There are also the ones that take a four minute sketch and stretch it out into an hour and a half.  It’s Pat: The Movie is that kind.  It’s 77 minutes worth of screen time filled with the original four minutes of shaky sketch material, about an hour’s worth of useless filler and some classy spit jokes to take up the remaining slack.

Man, there really are a weird amount of spit/snot gags in Pat.  It’s the sort of gross-out humor someone who wrote for Sonny and Cher would think was edgy.  They sprinkle them in liberally but for the most part just stick to what they know – that Pat could be either a guy or a girl is clearly a hilarious premise for an entire movie.  They hit it pretty hard.  Pat’s androgyny isn’t just critical to the plot, it IS the plot.  The movie is a series of scenarios that allow for casual observers to note that Pat has no clearly defined sexual identity.  It’s basically all the Pat sketches they rejected for the show mashed together like a shitty script chimera.  The people behind SNL tend to have a pretty solid background in comedy.  They put on a show every week and probably look at all sorts of scripts and concepts and reject the ones they think are terrible.  With that in mind, I’m going to reverse engineer a small portion of the script for It’s Pat now in order to demonstrate a point:

 

PAT’S APT, EXTERIOR — DAYTIME.

Pat and Chris leave their apartment at the same time as the couple who live across from them.  One of the neighbors is carrying a fan.

PAT

Hey, is that a big fan of yours? (Laughs like an asshole) That’s a joke I tell.

Pat falls down the stairs.  Everyone rushes to see if Pat is ok.

NEIGHBOR

Are you alright?

 

PAT

I Crushed my nuts!

 

NEIGHBOR

That’s gotta hurt.

Pat pulls some crushed walnuts out of his pocket.

PAT

Oh, shoot! There goes my afternoon snack…

And…scene.  The point I’m trying to illustrate is this: What the fuck?  I thought comedy was like…your thing, SNL?  This isn’t a movie that could be saved with some clever editing.  There are clear fundamental flaws with the very idea of it.  Aside from having no plot and terrible writing it suffers from the exact same problem as every child between the ages of three and about seventeen – it confuses annoyance with humor.  90% percent of Pat’s lines are something stupid about a penis-shaped object and then giggle-snorting.  That isn’t clever or funny and it makes me hate you.

The worst part about Pat is that it actually has the gumption to get philosophical with you.  The movie ends with Pat getting pants-ed at a Ween concert and then marrying Chris, the other dumb character they made up.  As the credits begin to roll Pat delivers a God-awful speech about how it’s ok to just be yourself.  Not only are we being lectured now by the same movie that just spent over an hour spitting at us and talking about its junk, but the whole fucking theme up to that point is that Pat is an insufferable little prick that needs to change.

If you need more evidence of how little effort went into this movie you don’t have to look any further than the title sequence.  It’s a jazzy little tune who’s only line is “It’s time for androgyny, here comes pat!” It plays in a loop while male and female gender symbols float by.  They’re basically tipping their hand in the first five minutes.  Pat may not be the worst movie ever, but it’s one of the worst premises.  Groundhog day had just come out and it’s like someone said “let’s do that, but with jokes instead of days.” I literally did not laugh once at this movie, even in my head.  That probably makes it one of the worst comedies I’ve ever seen, but there’s still plenty of movies left to lower the bar.

Pat is a sad attempt to cash in on the non-existent popularity of a bit character on a TV show.  It had some decent talent behind it but the effort and the giveafuck wasn’t there.  It’s annoying piece of shit, but mercifully it’s also forgettable.  Even as I write I’m forgetting more and more details and hopefully in a few weeks I’ll have forgotten about it entirely.  I can only hope.

 

What you should watch instead: Macgruber.  If you don’t laugh, I’m sorry you were born such an asshole.

 

Am I right or am I right?  Email all opinions, in the form of a yes or no answer, to [email protected] and explain yourself before you cause pain to yourself.  Or, follow me on Twitter @Dan_Tompkins.  You can shout at me there and as a bonus, I will amuse you.