Candyman makes serious business of comedy

Making people laugh is something comedian Shevrell ‘Candyman’ McMillan takes very seriously. McMillan has been using comedy as an outlet all his life, and now, with creditable success and growing popularity, he is even more motivated to take his talent throughout the Caribbean and beyond.

McMillan first came to national attention in 2008, when he won the Courts Comedy Competition. He then represented St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) regionally and placed second. However, it was his performance as Contestant #12 at Miss SVG 2010 that he remembers most fondly for making him a household name in comedy.

For the past three years, he has been hosting his very own comedy show. Branded as ‘Big Pappy Show,’ he is further expanding the growing event, with plans to include regional acts in 2018, and beyond that, to take the show on the road, first regionally, then internationally.

From as far back as childhood, McMillan has been using his life experiences, to fuel his passion for comedy.

“There’s somebody in my past, who is now deceased, who really impacted me and made me want to be a comedian. She was sick; she had a heart problem. I was about eight, nine years old and that’s when I really discovered comedy, that I could naturally make people laugh.

“I would make her laugh so much, she would hold her left breast in the area of her heart and she would laugh and she would say ‘my heart is hurting,’ and I would say, ‘ok, well let me stop,’ and she would say ‘no, no no. Keep going. I feel good. It makes me feel good.’ That’s when I knew I wanted to make people laugh for life.”

McMillan drew inspiration from comedians such as Paul Keens Douglas, Oliver Samuels, Larry Joseph, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. He recalls looking forward to entering secondary school, so that he could participate in the school’s drama festival, but that dream never materialized.

“St Vincent and the Grenadines would have known me a lot earlier if I had gotten that chance, because I was one of those guys greasing up my fingers and my lips to be in that while I was in primary school. I was very frustrated in secondary school that I didn’t get to do that.”

Undaunted, McMillan nevertheless used opportunities to hone his comedic skills at the St Martin’s Secondary School. Whenever a teacher was absent, the front of the class became the stage and his classmates the audience.

“I remember my teachers would come and peer through the window and have a good laugh watching me perform. I don’t have teachers that don’t have fond memories of me. I was miserable, but my miserable was the kind of miserable that they enjoyed. They would go to the staffroom and laugh about it afterwards.”

He credits then principal Gregory Sarka for giving him motivation to pursue his talent professionally. “He was a great principal. If he was not the kind of principal that he was, I probably would not have ended up being a comedian. He would come and he would stand at the window in such a way that I couldn’t see him and he would enjoy it, laugh and then he would step into my view and the whole class would go quiet, as if to say, ‘you in trouble now.’ He would call me, take me to his office and say, ‘you have a great talent. You’ll be a great entertainer, but make sure you educate yourself.’ That really helped me a lot.”

In his full-time job as a radio announcer on Xtreme Radio, McMillan uses comedy to connect with his audience.

“Radio is about companionship. People want a friend on the radio. Even if they don’t know you, they’ve never met you, they want to feel like, ‘that’s my friend.’ One of the main things you remember about your friends is the good times with them, so I try to be fun on the air and it helps being naturally a comedian, because you can relate things in a funny way.”

The award for Best Comedian of SVG is very special to McMillan, he says, because it came from Vincentians, whom he considers are hard to please.

“It was them saying we appreciate that you make us laugh. There’s nothing better for a comedian than to know that people do find you funny. That is the essence of success, no matter how much money you make from it.”