‘Kill Tony’ Regular Kam Patterson Lands on ‘Saturday Night Live’ Season 51 Cast List
A stand-up star who rose through the ranks of controversial conservative comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s talent showcase Kill Tony is joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, and he’s ready to make Shane Gillis look like Mr. Rogers.
Earlier today, SNL announced the addition of five comedians to the featured cast, with one new star coming from an increasingly sizable corner of the comedy industry that isn’t known for tuning in to NBC on Saturday nights. Kam Patterson, a crass, high-energy, Orlando-born comic known for his chaotic stories about his upbringing and his confrontational approach to crowd work, is one of the brightest stars of the right-leaning Kill Tony community, and his selection for the SNL Season 51 cast indicates that Lorne Michaels is making another run at courting the anti-woke, Joe-Rogan-listening audience that’s captured the entertainment industry’s attention following the most recent presidential election.
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Six years after NBC forced Michaels to fire Gillis just four days into the comic’s SNL tenure over Gillis’ past use of racist and homophobic jokes on his podcast, the SNL don has decided to recruit a stand-up comedian from the same side of the fence who can simultaneously court a conservative audience and give left-leaning SNL fans a fresh new reason to be outraged:
As demonstrated by his routines on sodomy and Trump, Patterson’s style of humor is explosive, expletive-laden and flagrantly, gleefully politically incorrect, which made him a perfect fit for the Kill Tony scene where he swiftly rose from a name in a hat to a fan-beloved regular. However, even the Kill Tony fandom is slightly confused about Patterson taking a job at a strictly TV-14 comedy institution that’s mostly watched by people whom Patterson would probably mock with slurs.
When rumors about Patterson’s candidacy for the SNL cast first broke out late last week, fans in the Kill Tony subreddit celebrated one of their own possibly getting a shot to perform on the biggest stage in comedy while simultaneously worrying about whether SNL is the right show to highlight his strengths. “I think he would get chewed up and spit out,” one pessimistic fan predicted.
“I mean, his career exploded over the last year, it makes sense he’d at least audition,” another user opined. “It would be wild if they cast him.”
Then, when the wild news broke that SNL did, in fact, cast Patterson, fans still were skeptical about the fit. One wrote, “Good for him but how’s this going to work since he can’t call people white bitches and spam the N word.”
While the addition of Patterson to the SNL cast makes sense as a business decision for both sides — Michaels gets access to the alt-right comedy community that he’s been desperate to court for years and Patterson gets massive media exposure in New York to go along with his Austin fame — the match between an obscene stand-up like Patterson and a sketch show with stringent content restrictions is a head-scratcher from a creative standpoint.
Unless Patterson thought that 30 Rock was actually full of rocks, it’s hard to see why the hell Patterson would even want to spend more than half his year pulling all-nighters at the SNL offices. Right before Patterson landed SNL, he posted a bit about how uncomfortable both he and his female scene partners have been since he started taking acting jobs:
When SNL Season 51 premieres on October 4th, Patterson is going to face a level of scrutiny that he’s never experienced from an audience that will be almost entirely unfamiliar to a Kill Tony disciple, even one who has followed Hinchcliffe all the way to Madison Square Garden. Both SNL fans and Kill Tony viewers will be watching to find out if Patterson can adapt and thrive in a sketch comedy setting that punishes his brand of explicit, slur-using stand-up, or if he’ll end up wishing he got fired after just four days.
