Interview Don't Spit The Water's Steve Gadlin

With his live-action game show Don’t Spit The Water, Steve Gadlin has been making Chicago audiences laugh for years. Now, with the help of strangers on Kickstarter, Gadlin hopes to raise enough money to make a Water pilot, which will air on a Chicago local channel. The A.V. Club caught up with Gadlin to talk about his quest, other projects, and a strange e-mail he got from a Nigerian playwright. 

The A.V. Club: What’s Don’t Spit The Water?

Steve Gadlin: It’s like a game show mixed with a stage show. It’s like that show Make Me Laugh, except our contestants fill their cheeks with water and try to keep it in. Also, instead of just stand-up, we have weird, conceptual freak-show acts and absurd performance artists.

We did it as a stage show at the Playground Theater for a long time, and now we’ve been travelling from place to place for a bit.

AVC: So why TV? Why is making a pilot important?

SG: TV seems like a natural next step for us. Everything we do at our company, Blewt, is very game show-y—like we’re making TV concepts instead of stage concepts, but we have access to a stage rather than a camera.

As far as getting a pilot done, we’ve had success shopping the show around. We’ve performed for Comedy Central in L.A., and our representation was shopping it around overseas and to other networks. We were successful without being really successful, though.

With the pilot, we’re trying to make it as TV-ready as we can, and then just drop it in people’s laps. We want to say, “We can do this ourselves. We’re just looking for the venue or a TV broadcast.”

I don’t know. We could be going about it backwards. I’m naïve about it. It’s a very homegrown way to try and get it done. I don’t know other people would go this route, but we’re writing the rules as we do it. 

AVC: What do you mean “successful without being really successful”?

SG: We started out big with this show and have gone downhill ever since 2008, at least related to TV. In 2008, we were on the Comedy Central stage talking to their head of new programming, and he stayed for our entire show. We met the next day, and he was very excited. It was our first experience out there, and I’m sure a lot of it was puff and baloney, but it felt very real at the time. Then he held back on the show for two weeks. He wouldn’t say no, and said they were seriously considering it. Then he called me directly and gave me the no. We got beat out by a show that they were a little more progressed on, and it was going to accompany The Gong Show when it re-launched. The other show had bigger names or something, too. The Comedy Central people said, “Well, if The Gong Show does well, we’ll definitely talk again,” and then The Gong Show stunk.

I’ve kept in touch with them, but it seems like once things go through this really exciting point, there’s not this sense of immediacy anymore. There’s been no real movement.

From there, we had some other close calls and a lot of talk. We’ve signed options with different production houses, but who knows what was really going on with those. I’m under the assumption that people were just sitting on it as an alternate pitch. Who knows how serious they were about ever actually making it go forward. 

AVC: So now you’ve gone DIY?

SG: We’ve scaled it down from what it used to be. We always wanted it to be a local show, though. I think if we can make it be what it is as a stage show, but on TV, it’ll be a cool venue for Chicago comics to try out some experimental stuff, and they can get exposure without going to New York or Los Angeles.

If we can keep it local and make it work, I’ll be so happy.

AVC: Who all have you had on the show so far? Any especially weird acts?  

SG: We’ve had a lot of cool people as part of the show. T.J. Miller has been on, and he’s doing stuff for Comedy Central now and has made some feature films. He was in Yogi Bear and Gulliver’s Travels. We’ve had a lot of comics on who have done Fallon, like they were making the rounds and now they’re really starting to explode in L.A. and New York.

Our show is part of the Chicago scene, and a lot of people perform on our show. I think it gives them a reason to stick around longer, too.

As far as weird stuff… everything on our show is weird. There was a guy named Noah who wore a skintight green body suit with a question mark on it, and he’d get in peoples faces. It was so weird, some people would spit the water just to make him go away. We’ve had fire-eaters and blockheads. The Puterbaugh Sisters, they’re pretty weird. They bring something new every week.

We had a dance troupe called the Alley Cat Dancers, and they’d do the same dance every week in these skintight black body suits. It was a weird dance.

I don’t know. A lot of the stuff is not funny out of context, but in the context of the show, it’s just right.

AVC: Have you ever had contestants do anything weird? Any puking?

SG: In the history of the show, we’ve had four barfs on the stage. The first was a big surprise, but when you think about it, if it’s late at night and you have drunk people filling their cheeks with water, it’s probably going to happen again.

We almost set fire to the theater once. I thought we were going to have our Great White moment where we kill a whole club full of people. It was because of this fire-eater who had only done their show a few times before, and they got nervous, and spilled their fluid. Next thing you know, the fire extinguishers are going and we evacuated the space. I’ve had nightmares ever since about it. We came real close to making the news in a bad way.

AVC: What other projects do you and Blewt have in the works?

SG: We do this one thing every year called Impress These Apes, which is like American Idol for comics, except the judges are hyper-intelligent apes from the future. Every week is something different on that one. There’s stand-up, singing, writing a movie, all sorts of stuff.

We have a show right now at the Annoyance Theater called The Nairobi Project. A year ago, I got a spam e-mail from a guy trying to get me to invest $30,000 in a play he wrote in Kenya. I ended up getting him to write me an original play for $50, and we perform that verbatim. It’s really bad, especially with real, talented actors performing.

Our cable access show, Talkin’ Funny, starts up in April. People can call in live, and we’ll try to have goofy stuff constantly happening on there.