One of five new additions to Saturday Night Live’s Season 51 cast, “Kill Tony” regular Kam Patterson, publicly declared his support for Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election.
In a stand-up set at the Improv comedy club last year, Patterson, 26, joked that Trump’s assassination attempt at his Butler, Pennsylvania rally was the only thing that convinced him to vote last fall.
“I’m voting now dog, he got it,” Patterson says in a clip from around the time of the shooting last July, which killed one rally goer and injured two others. “They shot him… he was fine and walked out with an American flag on him like this,” he also says, holding his fist in the air as he mimicked the now president’s defiant photo op after a bullet grazed his ear.
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Patterson may or may not have been serious about actually supporting Trump, but the sentiment behind the joke made it clear where he stood politically.
“He got it, he won,” Patterson says of Trump, noting that “Joe Biden’s biggest ‘opp’ is the stairs” (using slang for “opponent”) while Trump has “real opps.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to a representative for Patterson for comment.
How Patterson’s background and style will fit into SNL’s circle—or its style of comedy—will be interesting to watch. On a show that, even in the midst of a significant “shakeup” like the one Michaels promised, will be keeping its resident Trump-impersonator on payroll, how the first new SNL cast member to publicly cheer on Trump’s win will fare remains to be seen.
But the move already feels reminiscent of the hiring and then immediate firing of another “Kill Tony” regular, Shane Gillis, in 2019. As Michaels no doubt learned from that experience, his efforts to bring conservative fans to SNL have not always been met with open arms.
That debacle didn’t stop Michaels from inviting Gillis, who went on to become one of the country’s most popular stand-up comics, to host SNL twice in the years since. So perhaps it’s no surprise that he is doubling down for the show’s first full season of the second Trump era.
That era will be missing several familiar faces, as Michaels gave the axe to one-seasoner Emil Wakim, as well as Devon Walker and Michael Longfellow, who had spent three years in the cast
Heidi Gardner, whose exit announcement shocked fans the most after eight seasons on the show, also will not be part of Michaels’ reimagining of Season 51, though she’s likely to have left the show on her own accord.
Despite the “pressure to reinvent” the show after the 50th season celebration, one thing Michaels seems not to have wavered on is his insistence that the show appear unbiased politically.
“It’s the hardest thing for me to explain to this generation that the show is nonpartisan,” he told his biographer Susan Morrison. “We have our biases, we have our people we like better than others, but you can’t be Samantha Bee,” he also said, clarifying that he “meant one-sided and strident.”
Of Trump specifically, Michaels said, heading into the new season, “His politics are obviously not my politics, but denouncing him doesn’t work.”
Enter SNL new hire Patterson, whose pro-Trump take demonstrates how his political leanings may align with the comedy crew that gave him his start on a wider stage: MAGA comedian Tony Hinchcliffe and his “Kill Tony” podcast.
Hinchcliffe was the center of controversy in October when he performed at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and called U.S. territory Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”—before making another joke referencing racial stereotypes about a Black man and watermelon. The performance drew backlash from across the political spectrum, and the White House tried to distance itself from the roast comedian—who at the time hadn’t divulged whether he took the gig to support Trump or just make a buck.
After Trump won the election, however, Hinchcliffe revealed to Bill Maher that he “did it, literally, to hopefully get some, hopefully if only 10,000, not to mention 100,000, maybe 200 if we’re lucky, actual people to vote for him.”
He went further, defending Trump from naysayers and revealing that he would love to get a pat on the back from the president one day.
Trump “gets a weird, weird, weird rap in this world, man,” he told Maher. “The goal, it wasn’t just to swing a few thousand votes hopefully, or whoever listens to my podcast or whoever liked my silly performance on the Tom Brady roast or whatever,” he said, “It was also to f---ing have the president go, ‘That was cool. Thanks man. That awesome, I liked your set, you got the crowd going.’”
Patterson had joined Hinchcliffe’s “Kill Tony” as a regular a year and a half before the MSG controversy and remains a major part of the group, including with a performance at the “Mayhem at Madison Square Garden” special that premiered just last week on Netflix.
Patterson, like most comedians on the podcast, goes for shock value in his comedy, often espousing takes that would be too racist, homophobic, misogynistic, or any combination there of, for the mainstream. Comedians get 60-seconds to perform their best material as Hinchcliffe and others look on and either encourage or roast the hopeful comic when the minute’s over.
While often not explicitly political, the open attitude regarding objectively offensive material has endeared the program to many MAGA supporters, who see the show’s tone as an embrace of Trump’s “anti-woke” crusade. This is the platform that shaped much of Patterson’s comedy, as he spent two years of his career in Hinchcliffe’s orbit.
Patterson’s one-minute sets have been a hit with the show’s audience. His material, which can be seen in the compilation video below, includes calling women b----es and joking about smacking or stabbing them. Save for a few comments about having “no problem” with gay people and an oft-regurgitated joke about his crude excitement about his girlfriend’s abortion, Patterson has fit right into the “Kill Tony” troupe and its “anti-woke” fans, making his hyping of Trump’s assassination attempt reaction unsurprising.
