Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 3, 2025
I’d already been watching some of Kam Patterson’s material when rumors started that he’d be joining season 51 of SNL. Once it was confirmed, I dug into more of his work. Patterson is a regular on Kill Tony, where he’s performed bits about everything from mocking the looks of an intimacy coordinator he once worked with (a “fat and bald lady”), to joking about being unable to hide an erection during intimate scenes. He still uses “gay” as a pejorative in the way it was tossed around in the ’80s; he’s admitted that Trump turned him from a non-voter into a Trump voter after the assassination attempt; and he says he likes immigrants—as long as they speak English.
Five years ago, if Lorne Michaels had hired someone like Patterson, he’d have been pressured to cut him within a week. That’s exactly what happened with Shane Gillis after his past came to light. I don’t think Michaels was unaware of Gillis’s history. I think he was testing whether the show could pull in the alt-right audience. It might have worked too, given Gillis’s current popularity, which was only hastened by his firing.
SNL does have a history of conservative-leaning cast members — Dennis Miller, Jon Lovitz, Rob Schneider, and Victoria Jackson all fit the bill. Their post-SNL careers may not have been massive (though Miller did somehow land a disastrous stint on Monday Night Football), but during their time on the show they weren’t particularly divisive.
Patterson is different. He is going to be divisive. But we live in a different world now, and Michaels isn’t going to be pressured into firing him. Michaels has repeatedly expressed regrets for letting Gillis go. To Patterson’s credit, he is a genuine comedian, unlike many on Kill Tony who confuse cruelty with comedy. He has a commanding stage presence, confidence, and sharp delivery, and his comedy is more bro-y than malicious. But he’s also completely unfiltered, which could end up costing him his job on network TV.
In that sense, it’s less surprising that Michaels hired him — he’s desperate to tap into the alt-right comedy space — than it is that NBC signed off on it. Patterson openly admits he can’t act, and in the material I’ve seen, he rarely goes more than 20 seconds without saying something that would get NBC fined. Maybe that’s the point. He’s already huge in Tony Hinchcliffe’s world, and I suspect the only reason he hasn’t sat on a panel is because he’d overshadow everyone else. But competing for screen time with Ben Marshall and Andrew Dismukes every week isn’t going to raise his profile.
Getting fired, though — that would. It worked for Gillis. It didn’t hurt Damon Wayans (who admits he purposely got himself fired). Being on SNL will either force Patterson to smooth out the edges that make him appealing to his fanbase, or he’ll blow up so much that he pushes the show past what NBC can tolerate. Either way, it’s hard to see him lasting long enough to move from featured player to repertory.
But Michaels gets to say he reached out to the MAGA audience, while Patterson gets martyr status if he’s fired or pushed out. What’s certain is this: Patterson will be divisive, and he will bring in a bigger audience, at least in the short term — it just might not be the audience the rest of the cast wants. MAGA and the mainstream do not mix; it’s not worked anywhere else, and an 80-year-old Lorne Michaels isn’t going to be the guy to bridge the unbridgeable gap.
