Of course Will Ferrell shot some low-budget beer commercials for Old Milwaukee

Will Ferrell doing low-budget Old Milwaukee beer commercials in Davenport, Iowa? It's true. Ferrell reportedly shot about ten commercials for the brand in Iowa back in September, and it seems they're only airing locally in the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois.

Why would Ferrell do such a curious thing? There was speculation that the brewer's new owners, the Metropoulos brothers, had recruited Ferrell to help revitalize the brand in certain markets through a guerrilla-style marketing campaign, or that it might even be some kind of joke.

As it turns out, it was apparently Ferrell's idea to do the commercials in the first place. Darren Metropoulos told Adweek:

"Will Ferrell approached Old Milwaukee about creating ads because he's a big fan of the brand. He was interested in developing something unique and we gave him the freedom to pursue his creative vision and produce these spots with a local vibe."

Will Ferrell is a big fan of Old Milwaukee? That sounds as suspicious as a Colin Quinn tweet. I bet Adam McKay put him up to it. The grainy, apparently viewer-recorded spots do, of course, make eminent sense in the Ferrell universe. Two of them show Ferrell fishing by hand and by line in the Mississippi River. In a third one, Robert Goulet's alter ego stumbles as he tries to name the virtues of the beer using the letters in the word "Davenport."

The ads kind of resemble those fake SNL commercials, which make one nostalgic for the days when Ferrell's surreal sense of humor was in overdrive. Unsurprisingly, the locals are capitalizing on their brush with the funnyman, with Iowa-based Raygun creating a t-shirt that reads, "I like to come out here to Davenport and sit on my favorite log," a line from one of the fishing spots.