Pat O'Neill Riley is an androgynous fictional character[1] created and performed by Julia Sweeney for the American sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) from 1990 to 1994.

The central humorous aspect of sketches featuring Pat is the inability of others to determine the character's gender.

I'll just have one joke in here about how we don't know if that's a man or a woman just to sort of cover up for my lack of ability to really play a guy convincingly.

"[3] Pat O'Neill Riley is fat, has short, curly black hair, and wears thick glasses.

Some jokes would be a bit more buried, such as Pat remarking "In high school I did well in drama, especially when I played the role of Peter Pan!"

Dana Carvey, dressed androgynously, plays Pat's love interest Chris, and Nealon reprised his role as Bill.

Catherine O'Hara played a drugstore clerk, who tries to help when Pat asks for disposable razors.

O'Hara asks whether they would prefer a pink or blue package, but Pat says they will take whichever is cheaper.

When Pat goes to get a haircut, the hairdresser (George Wendt), has no idea whether to administer a male or female style.

The stylist asks which magazine Pat would like to read, naming gender-specific titles (Sports Illustrated and Glamour).

Co-workers Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Phil Hartman, and Kevin Nealon give Pat a surprise birthday party.

Gym employee Andrea (Hamilton) cannot figure out their sex, so, filling in the application form, she asks for "age?

Just as the audience is about to see whether they enter either the men's or the women's, Kevin Nealon as a TV news anchor on Weekend Update interrupts with a Special Report alert.

Aired on January 11, 1992 (Season 17, Episode 10) with Sweeney playing alongside Kevin Nealon as Bill, host Rob Morrow as Frank, Victoria Jackson as Dina, Dana Carvey and Mike Myers as guests, and Phil Hartman as the Narrator.

In honor of having Sharon Stone as the host, Pat is brought in for a Basic Instinct interrogation process.

Other characters are played by David Spade as a prospective tenant who flees, Joe Pesci as Graham Knox, and Dana Carvey as Pat's love interest Chris.

Carl (Walken), an account executive, has returned to work from needing a leave for psychiatric problems.

As the co-workers gather in the office, he expresses his extreme perplexity and discomfort around Pat to Phil Hartman.

Harvey Keitel plays a shipwrecked sailor on a desert island, who has grown lonesome is then greeted by another castaway, who turns out to be Pat.

when the ship was attacked by a violent storm and Pat was thrashed overboard and ended up on the sailor's island.

Pat appears at the end of the episode, alongside other recurring characters, singing "So Long, Farewell".

A writer for Splitsider wrote, "While she brought plenty of squeaky energy to her four-year stint at SNL, Julia Sweeney is known best for creating the most unnerving character in the show's history, the sex-unspecific nerd Pat.

With fourteen SNL appearances, not to mention an Emmy Awards ceremony cameo and 1994 feature film, the grating, whiny, yet perennially enigmatic Pat continues to be hailed as one of the show's most annoying — and oddly groundbreaking — recurring characters.

In fact, SNL's recurring character mold, as well as male/female cast member divide, would have gone largely untested without Pat's existence.

And for a featured player whose first year was spent in an overcrowded cast with 13 men and a mere 3 women, perhaps Sweeney sensed that a joke on the sex issue was the best way to get around it.

Just don't mistake him for the coach of a professional basketball team—or ask her middle name or any sex identifying questions for that matter.

"[15] Years after the sketches aired, Joey Soloway said they felt the premise and character were painful to non-binary and transgender people.

[16] Responding to Soloway's comments in 2019, Sweeney acknowledged that today "you would not make fun of somebody for being that way" and that the character was a bygone of "a whole other world.

"[17] The 2019 Showtime television show Work in Progress has suggested that the character was troublesome to non-binary and transgender people.

[2] The book Creating Contexts for Learning and Self-authorship: Constructive-developmental Pedagogy, states that the character's "gender is never revealed".