New ‘SNL’ Cast Member Kam Patterson Outed Himself as a Trump Voter

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 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.

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 material demonstrates a how Patterson’s 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 the 26-year-old 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.

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.

One problem is a lot of Freepers act like you are either a communist or a conservative. The reality is that there people in the middle, and there are some people, even in Hollywood who know nothing or care nothing about politics. And there are others who hide their beliefs

Back in the 80's I never heard Victoria Jackson was conservative or Christian in the 80's, now it's in the open.

I don't think Dennis Miller was conservative until after 9/11.

I am not sure if Norm McDonald was a conservative, but he wasn't a lefty. He said he hates political comedy.

Jim Downey, who was a writer on the show, and sometimes head writer, claims he is conservative, but not really sure about that.

You missed a lot from the late 80's and early 90's:

Rob Schneider is definitely conservative now, not sure what his exact evolution was.

Dana Carvey is definitely conservative now.

Jon Lovitz is definitely more of a conservative. I can't write what he said about Obama on this web sit.

I think Lovitz, Carvey, and Schneider may have had some conservative tendencies, but as the Democrats moved left they magnified. Or they just hid it when building up their career.

David Spade is kind of like the above, and he has said as he's gotten older, "he leans more towards Republican views."

Adam Sandler is supposed to be a Republican, but he doesn't like to talk publicly about politics. He performed at the RNC Convention in 2004, and he donated to Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. Yes, Giuliani is far from a conservative, but for Hollywood it might as well be the John Birch Society.

Colin Quinn is against political correctness, not sure what else that applies to.

I don't know much about Robert Downey Jr., but apparently in the 2000's he's leaned to the right and actually talked about it. Yes, he was on SNL in the 80's. I found this quote to be interestingL

I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.”

Back in the 80's, Eddie Murphy had a regular character that made fun of rich progressives.

I'm not saying Chris Rock is conservative, but he doesn't always go by left orthodoxies: A 1990 “Weekend Update” desk bit in which Chris Rock complains both about how much he hates taxes and how he doesn’t mind if prisons are uncomfortable for the inmates. (“Jails are so nice, they come back twice. … They don’t have this problem in Iran because it’s hard to snatch another purse if you don’t have another hand.”) A year later, Rock returned to support the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing him only of the crime of using bad pickup lines in the workplace.

These to sketches make fun of lefties too:

Black Jeopardy with Tom Hanks - SNL (I don't know how they got Tom Hanks to do this, let alone how it got on TV.)

Dog Translator - SNL [How did this get on?]

Who wrote the above two sketches? Maybe there have been conservative writers or cast members in the last 25, they just kept it on the downlow.

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