A Publication for West Coast Alumni and Friends
Vol. 1, No. 1 / January 2001 - California Connection: Making a Difference Where Technology Meets Real Life

Engineering Show Biz Success

"I know how to be a girl, but I know how to be a dude, too."

What's the best way to break into show business, short of being Madonna's first-born child? If you're Nancy Pimental, you start with an engineering degree.

Pimental has put together quite a Hollywood resume in the last few years. She's the recently crowned co-host of Comedy Central's hit game show Win Ben Stein's Money. Serving as announcer, questioner and comic relief, Pimental is the teasing, wisecracking foil to the more buttoned-down, dry-witted Stein. Taking witty jabs at contestants and host alike, she holds her own with the brainy former Nixon speechwriter who catapulted to fame thanks to his now-famous turn as a teacher ("Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?") in the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

The show is just the latest coup for Pimental. She was also a writer for Comedy Central's notoriously crass but hilariously satirical animated series South Park, and she's the author of a romantic comedy, tentatively titled The Sweetest Thing, starring Cameron Diaz, that will begin filming in March. Not bad for a woman who was raised in a small Massachusetts town where, she says, "you were supposed to do something practical."

In her case, "something practical" meant earning a chemical engineering degree at WPI. But after graduation, she turned to her longstanding interest in theatre. She ended up in L.A., where she toiled for eight years as a stand-up comic and improvisational actor. She eventually got her foot in the door with her first South Park script, and she hasn't looked back. She sold The Sweetest Thing to Columbia Pictures for $1.5 million in 1999.

The movie project has made her name well known among insiders in the biz, but it is her role as resident wiseacre on Ben Stein that is making hers a recognizable face to the general public. On the show, Stein pits himself against three contestants in a battle over $5,000 of "his" money.

Pimental gets along well with Stein, but is she accepted more generally in the boys' club that is the comedy world (where Jerry Lewis can dismissively remark that he doesn't find any female comedians funny)? She says her education in a male-dominated environment prepared her for that challenge. "I know how to be a girl, but I know how to be a dude, too."

Though Columbia has eagerly expressed interest in her next script, whatever it might be, Pimental is taking her time on her next move. "I don't just sit down and write," she says. "I outline and think everything out beforehand," something that she credits to her WPI education, which also imbued her with perhaps the most important trait for a comic: confidence. After all, she says, "There aren't many more difficult things than engineering."