Alumni Magazine - Spring 2008 - (Page 25)

Funny C aptain Cook’s, a seafood restaurant in Cupertino, Calif., may seem an unlikely place for an epiphany. But it was there, on the night of June 19, 1987, that Don McMillan ’81 discovered his true life’s calling. The restaurant’s basement bar had an Open Mike every Wednesday night, and McMillan—an electrical engineer working as a chip designer in the Silicon Valley at the time—chose that venue to make his standup comedy debut in front of a crowd of about 80. “It was an out-of-body experience,” McMillan recalls. “I remember doing my first bit about growing up as a red-haired, freckled kid and being called ‘Carrot Top,’ and how I hated that because it gave me nightmares about my head being gnawed off by giant rabbits. I remember people laughing—and I was so relieved that they laughed that I forgot my second bit.” His inexperience showing, McMillan promptly announced to the crowd that he had forgotten his next bit, and the crowd yelled “Do the first one again!” But McMillan just stood there for about 30 seconds—what he calls “an enormous amount of time in comedy”—before blurting out: “Oh wait! Now I remember what the next line is: I have a really active imagination.” The crowd—apparently struck by the incongruity of a man not being able to think of anything to say for 30 seconds and then telling them, “I have a really active imagination”— cracked up. And a comedian was born. “For me, this was a sign: Even when I messed up, I got a laugh,” McMillan says. McMillan has been getting laughs ever since, carving out a unique niche for himself in the comedy world by incorporating jokes about engineering, math, computers, and other hightech topics into his act. He’s almost certainly the only comedian who uses PowerPoint in his routine, taking his audiences through presentations that highlight to an absurd degree such universal mistakes as spelling blunders, color botch-jobs, and bullet points gone wild. Having performed for more than 300 corporations, including IBM, Apple, Sony, Hewlett Packard, and AT&T Bell Labs, McMillan tailors each of his performances to the company by researching and including specific jargon. In addition to corporate gigs, he still performs in comedy clubs, films, television, and commercials. McMillan is probably best known for the 15 commercials he did a decade ago for Budweiser THE MATH CHEER “e” to the “u ”, “d” “u” “e” to the “x ”, “d” “y”. Cosine, seca nt, tangent, sine, “3” point “1” “4” “1” “5” “ 9”. Binary, octa l, decimal, H EX! We think Mat h is better th an sex! Go team!!! McMillan as Gus, the Budweiser delivery guy as Gus, the Bud delivery guy who manned the “freshness hotline” and kept the world safe from “skunky beer.” He also has appeared in such movies as Air Bud 3: World Pup, Life Without Dick, Macon County Jail, and Party Crashers, as well as in the TV shows Star Trek: Voyager, Babylon 5, City Guys, and Step by Step. was spotted by a customer, who yelled, “Hey, it’s the Bud guy!” The customer then spied a life-size, cardboard cutout of Gus that was on display in the store, grabbed it, carried it over to McMillan and held it up next to him. “Look,” the guy yelled, “it’s really him. You’re really him, aren’t you?” sprING 2008 25 photos courtesy of eNtertAINMeNt WeeKLy INc. ALL rIghts reserved. His recurring role as Gus, which included a commercial that appeared during Super Bowl XXXI, gave McMillan a taste of fame. Only instead of having to deal with the paparazzi, McMillan had to contend with a late-night crowd of beer aficionados at a Philadelphia-area 7-11. “It was 2 a.m. and I was returning to my parents’ home in Cherry Hill, N.J., after doing a bunch of bar appearances around Philadelphia,” McMillan recalls. “Bud would dress me in the full delivery guy clothes that I wore in the ads and take me to 10-15 bars across a region. I would go around handing out free Budweiser to patrons and ‘checking’ their non-Bud beers for freshness. It was a lot of fun—and people love you when you hand out free beer!” So McMillan walked into a 7-11 to pick up a soft pretzel and a coffee for the drive home when he

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Alumni Magazine - Spring 2008 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Alumni News Cover Story: In Galileo's Wake Technically Funny The Healing Game Looking for America The Last Word

Alumni Magazine - Spring 2008

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