‘Don’t Spit the Water’ crew hopes to hook viewers with wacky show

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Updated: May 9, 2012 9:45AM

If you tune in to WCIU-Channel 26 Saturday night at midnight, don’t expect to see “Cheaters” host Joey Greco moderate a parking lot spat between a furious wife and her philandering husband.

That precious parcel of broadcast real estate belongs — for one evening only, as of now — to a wacky comedy game show called “Don’t Spit the Water!” The greatly condensed version of a live 90-minute yuks-and-talent extravaganza that ran weekly at Chicago’s Playground Theater between 2004 and 2008, “DSTW” is the brainchild of Chicago comedy fixture and Blewt! Productions proprietor Steve Gadlin.

Its premise: contestants attempt to hold water in their mouths while being comically accosted; points are awarded at the rate of one per second of retention. Toward the end there’s a “speed round” in which two contestants face off.

By day a web guru for WCIU owner Weigel Broadcasting, Gadlin tried to shop his unabashedly off-kilter invention to high-profile networks such as Comedy Central and MTV, but to no avail. After three years of near and not-so-near misses, he and his cohorts decided to take matters into their own hands. More than $6,000 in production funding was raised via an online kickstarter.com campaign, and airtime came courtesy of Weigel’s executive vice president (and Gadlin’s boss) Neal Sabin.

“I watched it, I laughed a couple times and I said, ‘Why not?’ It’s worth a shot,” says Sabin, who colors himself “pretty impressed” with the final product. He selected the midnight time slot because that’s when “Saturday Night Live” ends and there are plenty of wide-awake viewers (in a comedy state of mind, no less) flipping around for other fare.

“There’s a seed of something very interesting there, and it’s worth exploring.”

(“Cheaters,” in case you’re wondering, will air immediately after at 12:30.)

Depending on cost, Sabin says, more episodes might get made. Gadlin would love to tape the program on a regular basis locally “for a very long time” in the vein of WGN-Channel 9’s venerable “The Bozo Show,” but for adults.

“I think Chicago could use a show that’s kind of a rite of passage for people in their 20s and 30s to get tickets and go see Chicago’s crazy live game show,” Gadlin says. “I’m very passionate about Chicago’s comedy community. It’s a group that is continually being siphoned to one coast or the other to do bigger and better things. So I loved the opportunity, when we were doing this as a stage show, to showcase these people who were doing work that I saw as so innovative and so smart, and I want to give that community a television venue, some exposure on-air.”

As the Blewt! website proudly notes, past “DSTW” cast members include accomplished comedians T.J. Miller (“Cloverfield”), Nick Vatterott, Jared Logan and Robert Buscemi.

“I want it to be the hipster date of the century, to be a member of our studio audience,” Gadlin says. The show could be valuable — to WCIU or another outlet — from a business standpoint, too, he notes. “I don’t see this as just a bunch of goofballs screaming for attention.”

Neither does Al Parinello. A New York-based entrepreneur, Parinello has done business with big-name comedy types (Steve Allen, Andy Kaufman) during his long career in the electronic media and broadcast field. He also co-helms the Andy Kaufman Comedy Award talent competition, which annually receives hundreds of taped submissions. Along with his “DSTW” co-host and “Sasha and the Noob” comedy duo partner, Paul Luikart, Gadlin took second place last year.

“Their brand of comedy is so absurd that you can easily dismiss it as being sophomoric and neophyte-ish, but I look at it and I see absolute genius, which absolutely comes through all the time,” says Parinello, who donated $1,000 to the kickstarter.com campaign — the largest single donation of 101 total. “There’s nothing funnier than a comic who gets the balance right about making a point with the audience and making fun of themselves, and they do it brilliantly.”

Despite the program’s less-than-splashy late-night debut on a local station in the country’s No. 3 television market, Parinello sees considerable potential.

“How many comics are sitting around who have great talent and who don’t have a show on at midnight on a television station?” he says. (The obvious answer: a lot.) “So I think their chances are enhanced greatly. They’re doing everything in their power. One of the things I love about those guys is that they don’t sit back and wait for it to happen. They are aggressively on the front lines, being as creative and innovative as I’ve ever seen.”

But even if his brainchild never airs again, Gadlin says, “That’s fine. It was a very fun, long, eight-year journey.”