The beloved drag character Patty from HR is about to retire. And while the rest of us can only fantasize about getting to spew our venomous last words as employees with adoring audiences cheering us on, “Patty from HR’s Exit Interview” makes the dream real Friday-Saturday, Sept. 1-2, at the South of Market nightclubOasis.

But Patty — the creation of San Francisco performer Michael Phillis — began as a joke.

It was the early days of Baloney, the gay all-male revue that first performed at Oasis in 2015, and some performers were worried that photos or videos of them posing sexually, in various states of undress, might make the office rounds at their corporate day jobs.

So Phillis, who co-founded Baloney with Rory Davis, adjusted his curtain speech to say, “You can’t take any photos because on Monday morning we don’t want you to go into your open office workspace, and in walks Patty from HR saying, ‘Oh, here’s these 37 blurry photos on your Facebook. That looked like fun,’ ” he recalled.

“If Patty didn’t come see the show, Patty doesn’t get to see the show. F— Patty,” the speech would continue. Over time, “F— Patty” became so much of a mantra for Baloney that Patty would start to appear in skits, embodied by various performers.

But Patty truly came into her own when Phillis, now 40, got invited to participate in PlayGround’s 2019 Solo Performance Festival. “I always had this idea for a solo show where everything goes wrong,” Phillis said. Davis suggested he combine that notion with Patty. The result was a hit.

Phillis gave Patty distinct characteristics: an earth-toned suit, a wrist brace for her chronic carpal tunnel. Patty also draws on Phillis’ time at San Francisco’s Circus Center — “I’m a clown school dropout,” he joked. Her dowager’s hump, outsize butt and resulting visible panty line, or VPL, are all nods to bouffon, the satirical school of clowning defined by its characters’ grotesque bulges. Her lipliner is always many shades too dark, which makes her lips look like clown lips, and Phillis keeps them contorted in a grimace.

But Patty doesn’t have resting bitch face because she’s looking to fire you. She’s actually bad at her job — the kind of person who takes 30 minutes to find the right pen in her purse. “She’s always stressed,” Phillis said, sympathetically. “There’s never a moment where the world settles enough for Patty to be happy.” Her HR training schedule — each show is structured as a “mandatory” training for its audience, one that Patty inevitably flubs — is endless. “As soon as you finish the one training, the clock starts for when you have to do the next one.”

In her badness, Patty is relatable and comforting. However bad you think you are at your job, Patty is worse. A typical show arc: You stereotype her, thinking you know exactly who she is. You hate her. You laugh at her. Then you love her and root for her.

The twist is that Phillis isn’t out to ridicule HR; out of drag, he’s worked in the field in various capacities at Pixar, Square and Life Theatre Services, the Emmy-winning Bay Area firm that provides live-action alternatives to the painfully awkward videos about sexual harassment, racial discrimination and other state-mandated subjects familiar to most office workers at large companies.

“The actual training is really important to me,” Phillis said. “There’s a responsibility when you’re talking about things that are identity-based, especially things that have vulnerability attached to them. I didn’t want to make fun of those things, but I could make fun of the way that they’re presented.”

Life Theatre Services Co-Founder Cynthia Cristilli — who’s also hired Phillis to make some actual HR videos as Patty — said Patty explores the danger and humor in a conundrum most HR workers confront. “There’s a big distrust of HR, and that’s something Michael touches on: the push-pull between doing what’s right for the employees and then kowtowing to the company.”

Phillis can tell when there are fellow HR professionals in the audience by the way they laugh knowingly at Easter egg jokes about HIPAA or PIPs (performance improvement plans). “The HR people I know are some of the least appropriate people — secretly. I mean, they know all the rules, but that doesn’t mean that they love them. It’s the Bruce Wayne-Batman of it all: ‘I have to be this way publicly, and when it’s by myself, I’m the biggest violator of all.’ ”

但是经过四年的表演帕蒂,including at the height of the pandemic, when her videos about (mis)using Zoom were a rare bright spot in dark times, Phillis knew it was time to retire her, for a few reasons. One is that he covered all the training subjects that interested him. Another is that he’s been focusing on large-scale immersive projects, such as “Pride in Gotham,” staged at the Hibernia in San Francisco, and“Thighs Wide Shut,”which returns to St. Joseph’s Arts Society in October.

A final one is the way the pandemic has changed attitudes about work and HR, especially as more and more HR software promises to do work once performed by humans.

“A lot of us are grappling with changing our jobs, changing our living area, changing what we thought our lives were. The pandemic really threw so much of that into tumult, and I think that this is the next step of that for Patty.”

Patty, Phillis points out, has never talked about her personal life during shows; that would be unprofessional in her eyes. “How does my job define who I am, especially with somebody like Patty?” Phillis asked. Now it’s time for her to figure out who she is beyond her job.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com