Kam Patterson Is Too Funny to Play It Safe

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This past January, halfway through his first season as a Saturday Night Live cast member, Kam Patterson returned to his roots: a stand-up set on “Kill Tony.” The long-running live podcast is taped in Austin, Texas, an unlikely new hub of American comedy — a place where people pushed out of or fed up with New York or Los Angeles can strike new ground. 

“Kill Tony” is one of the city’s premier showcases, averaging a few million downloads every episode. It’s where Patterson first started getting attention as a comic in 2023, so it made sense that he’d return with a piping-fresh report from the front lines of the East Coast. 

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On stage, Patterson riffed about how weird it felt to stumble into this sort of success, a granted wish from a lamp he never rubbed. “I know how huge it is, but understand something: I’m 26, and I’m black,” he told the crowd. “I’ve never seen the show. I have no idea what the fuck I signed up for.” 

Now in his second season of SNL, he has a better idea, a better handle on the rhythms of the schedule, a grip on the pace, a sense of which writers to work closely with. “They kind of throw you into the fire, but I like that,” he says on a September afternoon at a rooftop restaurant in midtown Manhattan. He’s eating pretzel bites instead of the watermelon-and-feta dish we wanted but decided against because of the optics. He’s wearing an Aime Leon Dore T-shirt, Ksubi jeans, and a chunky silver chain, a gift from UFC fighter Suga Sean O'Malley after Patterson kept him from losing an even more expensive piece of jewelry at a party. (O'Malley dropped his $20,000 watch and didn’t notice; Patterson heroically pointed it out.) “When I start doing anything in my life, I’d rather you throw me into the deep end,” Patterson says, “and I can try to figure out how to swim.”

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Feeling more settled comes in part from — in his act — highlighting how absurd it is that he’s here in the first place, a 27-year-old only six years into his standup career, a fish not just out of water but swimming around in champagne. (More from “Kill Tony”: “I was on national television doing this,” he said, throwing his limbs around, grinning. “I’ve shot at somebody before. Can you understand how crazy that change is?”) It’s not just that Patterson is black or young, but it’s where he’s from. Stand-up comics, like their rapper cousins, are products of their environment, influenced by and inflected with the stuff they breathed or saw or heard when they were young. Patterson is straight Orlando, a country cousin with beach access. He’s a man from Florida, not a Florida Man, and he’s proud of it. He grew up in Ocoee, just west of the city. “Orlando got a lot of dope things coming out,” he says. “We had a decent music scene until people started going to jail,” he adds, explaining that a RICO order on the city just “took everybody.”

Both Orlando and Austin informed Patterson’s raunchy comedic style. (Austin is not only a new comedy frontier but, to some, a nasty one; critics say the city’s style tends to be crass and offensive and conservative.) “I’m very different from the usual,” he says. “I’m a rough-around-the-edges type person. I say all the words.” He brings a welcome energy to Studio 8H. “Kam is a happy and grateful young man, and that’s something that adds a lot to the environment of the show,” says his castmate Marcello Hernández.

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Patterson’s comedy builds on his contrasts: off-color commentary in sweet, cuddly packaging, like a Sour Patch Kid or Seth MacFarlane’s Ted. “They was calling me all type of conservative online, and I say, ‘I vote what my mama vote for, and my mama is a strong black lady.’ I tell people, ‘Don’t take everything I say when it comes to comedy at face value, just for the simple fact that I didn’t know that a pickle was a cucumber until like a year ago.’” 

Up close, Patterson is all energy but total focus. He starts six new sentences a minute but never forgets my name. He was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid. To describe his own brain, he references the episode of SpongeBob SquarePants wherein the title character is unable to recall his own name, and the little office workers running around inside his skull panic and catch on fire.

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Patterson watched a lot of cartoons growing up — Danny Phantom, The Fairly OddParents — and realized he could make people laugh at a young and malleable age. And it wasn’t just people — Patterson would make up long, crazy stories about his little league football seasons, and his cool older cousins would die laughing. One night, one cousin handed him a piece of paper intended to be a ticket to Patterson’s show. “That was super cool to me,” he says, of gaining their respect. In elementary school, his teacher let him stand in front of the class and tell jokes if he completed his schoolwork.

Patterson started stand-up in earnest when he was 22 and quickly made a name for himself in the Florida scene. This satisfied him, but then one day he met Uncle Lazer, an Austin-based comic. (“He is the definition of a nigga from Texas,” Patterson says, then hears himself. “He white, but somebody from Texas.”) Lazer saw Patterson’s set and encouraged him to move to a city with a bigger scene lest he be pigeonholed as “the Florida guy.” Patterson saved up a month’s worth of paychecks and set out for the Lone Star State. It was his first time there, and he spent it knocking on the doors of comedy clubs, trying to find someone who would give him a few minutes. Once he did, he killed.

After moving to Austin, he worked odd jobs and did open mics, regularly putting his name in the hat for “Kill Tony.” When he was eventually selected, it felt like a miracle. He’d been trying for months. He told a joke about growing up in a roach-infested home, inviting a date over and having to surreptitiously kill the bugs before she saw them. She eventually did, but she waved it away, saying that she had roaches, too. “And I’m like, ‘Ew, that’s disgusting,’” Patterson says. 

He got into the rotation, then was asked to be a regular, which meant he had one minute to tell one new joke every week. He did this for two years, a veritable comedy degree. But that doesn’t mean he’s lazy. He cites the LeBron James quote about how winning is a curse: “It doesn’t matter how much you’ve won before. You’re not a winner until you win again and again and again.” 

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Before getting hired on SNL, he was cast in 72 Hours, a Kevin Hart bro-comedy, alongside future coworkers Hernandez and Ben Marshall. It was a career high for Patterson, who loves Hart so much that he read Hart’s memoir, twice. (Sometimes, Hart would give Patterson a piece of advice, and he’d gleefully recall it from Hart’s book.) “The main reason I do stand-up is because, in middle school, a girl was like, ‘Nigga, you think you Kevin Hart or something?’” he says. “And I’m like,” — he affects bashfulness, batting his eyes like Bambi — “‘Maybe I do.’” 

Historically, SNL’s improv-trained cast members have an easier time getting cast in writers’ sketches, and the stand-up comics are more likely to create a sketch around their own joke or formulate a “Weekend Update” monologue. Patterson’s strength is in the latter zone. A recent episode featured him pretending to be a major fan of Ryan Murphy’s Glee (“I’m a Gluniac! I’ve been Glooning all day!”). Michael Che sees through the charade and encourages him to be himself, to talk about what he actually wants to talk about. Patterson is game. “Can I talk about the time I got robbed during a threesome?” Nope. “OK, what about how I’ve never voted in my life?” No. “I got a fun story about me going to a strip club? Let me set the scene. I was 14 years old…” Che waves him off.

Patterson describes himself as an avid student of his craft; an ideal night involves performing for five minutes at six different comedy clubs. But his funny is innate, so natural it’s almost an affliction. He talks, and you laugh. It helps that he is an accomplished cusser, in the game since he was eight, when his dad gave him permission. “My dad was like, ‘Well, you small and you can’t fight, but you can do two things: You can cuss real good to get them scared of you, and you can bite them if they put their hands on you.”

But what’s cool about SNL is that it’s a group sport, after years of performing solo. Among Patterson’s favorite writing partners are “the Harvard boys,” Tucker Flodman and Maxwell Gay. “I went to the office the first day and I was just like” — he deepens his voice into a growl and slams his hands on the table— “y’all writing for me now.” “I don’t write," he says. "I kind of spew things out, and they take my shit in my mind and put it into a format that’s suitable for the show. That’s what I really enjoy about SNL: the teamwork.”

The day before our interview, Patterson bought his first journal. “People always say either do that or go to therapy, and I don’t want to talk to nobody, so I started writing,” he says. “My dreams are so vast and insane in my mind. I don’t feel like I’m there yet. It’s nice, where I am, it’s a blessing to be here. But I don’t feel like I’m chasing some crazy shit.” 

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One of his dreams is to buy a town, “some Walt Disney-type shit, like Celebration, Florida.” It’s a plan inspired by Dave Chappelle who, in an effort toward economic revitalization, has purchased a significant number of businesses and land in his hometown in Ohio. Only recently did Patterson learn about the 1920 Ocoee Election Day Massacre, when the Ku Klux Klan murdered 50 black residents for attempting to vote, and he thinks it’d be nice to give back to the community and invest in local economies. But then, he has taller mountains to climb. “I can’t wait to say ‘nigga’ on TV,” he says, a wicked smile in his eyes. “One day, they gonna let me.”

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