Paul Luikart won't hesitate to cram BBQ sardines and marshmallow hamburgers into his mouth on live television to make you laugh. He started exploring comedy in college, where he met cohort Steve Gadlin. The two of them perform as clueless characters Sasha and the Noob in the weekly tv show Talkin' Funny (video archives here), the comedy game show Don't Spit the Water, and elsewhere. They and various friends are also now putting on the Impress These Apes shows (Monday nights at 8 at the Playground Theater), in which eight contestants perform for a judging panel of vengeful, superintelligent apes, who may or may not destroy all of humanity with their earthquake machine. He also has a plan for defeating the biblical Samson, should any conflict between them lead to a fight to the death.

How did you meet Steve Gadlin, and how did the idea for Don't Spit the Water come about?

I met Steve at Miami University. I was a freshman looking for a way to get involved in stuff and I met him at a creative writing group. He told me and a couple of other folks there about this other group he was in, which turned out to be an improv comedy troupe. That was pretty much what I wanted to do in life, so I joined up and Steve and I started doing comedy together. That was in 1996. As far as Don't Spit the Water...Steve came up with this one. It started with the characters (Sasha and the Noob), which we did for the first time in this midnight slot at the Playground at this kind of...variety show type of thing called Ray Mees's Robot Parade. We just did ten minutes of ridiculous standup. Later on, our improv team at the Playground had gotten ourselves in over our head, said we were going to do a sketch show and didn't put together anything in time, so we had to fill those show slots at the last minute and Steve came up with the idea to use Sasha and the Noob to host a game show. So, we put DSTW up in the slot that sketch show was going to go in.

Whose idea was it that The Noob's childhood trauma would keep him mute? In the long run, has this been a good thing or a bad thing for you?

The muteness of the Noob was also Steve's idea...it came along with the original proposal of these characters for Ray Mees's Robot Parade. Basically, he was like, 'Okay, what if we had these two vaguely Eurpean comedians who aren't funny, but think they are, and their names are, like, Sasha and the Noob or something, and let's say the Noob is actually mute because he saw his mom get killed right in front of him when he was a kid.' and I was like, 'Ha. Yeah, I'm in.' The Noob's muteness has been both good and bad. Good in the sense that I like to use my face and body to convey funny things on stage. We've gotten lots of dark humor mileage out of the jokes that come out the Noob's Mom's death. It's bad, though, because...I mean, it's tough to not talk! It would be a different show, though, if the Noob talked.

What's the worst thing you ever had to eat live on the air?

I think the worst thing was a BBQ sardine. To be truthful, I didn't even actually eat it. I just touched my tongue to it. That was plenty. We ate these marshmallow hamburgers, too. Those were awful, mainly because they were big and we ate them. All. In less than a half hour.

What's all this Impress These Apes silliness we keep hearing about? How is that going?

(Photo at right by Fuzzy Gerdes - from his set of Impress These Apes pix.)

Apes! Yes! I think this is going to be a great show. We had a show run through this weekend, and it was great to see the full thing coming together. It feels really coagulated. It's great to work with the likes of Steve and Jared Logan and Gena Bailey and Tyler Lansdowne and Dan Telfer to concoct this thing. These people crack me up. So, yeah, the gist of it is...in the future, a scientist experiments on three apes, but it goes awry, because they get smarter then him and enslave him. They go back in time (to 2007) and demand to be impressed by 8 handpicked people or they'll destroy the world with their Earthquake Conductor. Which they have also invented.