Group dances on ‘Capitol Steps’

In December 1981 — a time long before “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” or Tina Fey’s weekly impressions of then-Gov. Sarah Palin — a handful of Congressional staffers were mocking Capitol Hill. Capitol Steps

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In December 1981  — a time long before “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” or Tina Fey’s weekly impressions of then-Gov. Sarah Palin — a handful of Congressional staffers were mocking Capitol Hill.

They decided that for their upcoming office Christmas party they would perform songs and sketches that would parody figures and events that were currently in the news. Much to the surprise of the staffers involved, their performance was positively received, and thus, the Capitol Steps were born.

Almost three decades later, the troupe has grown in size to include 30-some members and has recorded 33 albums  — their latest, Liberal Shop of Horrors, was released in May.

“With the drastic changes in size and stature have come many changes in how the group operates,” co-founder and co-writer Elaina Newport said. The Capitol Steps are a fixture on public radio and have performed for five U.S. presidents. Now they’re coming to perform for a Pittsburgh audience.

“When we started, we all worked on Capitol Hill,” Newport said, “and for the first 15 years we had a strict rule that you had to have worked on Capitol Hill to join… Today, we’re about half-and-half — half former Capitol Hill staffers and half Washington-area performers.”

Although there have been many changes in personnel both within the Steps and within the political arena that the group satirizes, Newport feels that they’ve managed to handle each of the challenges that have been presented to them.

“We used to worry that Congress would become quietly competent and solve all the problems, and we wouldn’t have any song material,” Newport said, before adding, “we worried about that for about five minutes.”

Mark Eaton, a co-writer and performer who joined the Capitol Steps in 1993, agrees with this assessment. He stated that “everyone likes to see politicians torn down to some degree, and because of that, there’s always going to be something out there.”

The songs that the Steps perform largely follow the “Weird Al” Yankovic formula and range from parodies of show tunes (“Obama Mia”) to disco songs (“Hillary Will Survive”).

While Eaton says that “the best songs typically take a half hour to write lyrics for,” the process of actually finding songs to match the topics themselves tends to be a little more difficult.

“Sometimes there is a song we’d love to use but have to wait for a story,” Newport said. “For example, ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ was a song we liked, but until the Governor of South Carolina had a scandal involving Argentina, we had no reason to use it.”

Eaton, however, sees a different problem in regards to finding songs for use in parody.

“It’s really pretty difficult to find a popular song that everybody’s familiar with these days. I actually think the most recent song that we did a parody of was the ‘Macarena,’ and that was in the 1990s. Now that the Internet’s made it so you can have your own station to listen to, we’ve had to start worrying about using a song for parody too many times, because there’s only so much popular, familiar material to mine,” she said.

Part of what has made the Capitol Steps so successful is their unique ability to stay steadfastly bipartisan in their lampooning of political figures.

“We’re like America,” Eaton said of the Steps’ political leanings. “We have some lefties, some righties, and even a few I-don’t-cares. We’ve managed to have some fun with being so diverse, too, where we’ll maybe have someone who really likes a certain Democrat have to sing a song that makes fun of them or vice versa. In the end, though, it’s really just about making the audience laugh.”

And while many humorists feared that Barack Obama, whose public persona is practically the reverse image of his predecessor’s, would usher in an era of professionalism where political comedy would cease to exist, the Capitol Steps feel that politicians will never stop providing them with fresh material.

“It’s true,” Newport said, “it’s a constant challenge and some days you think nothing funny will ever happen again. Then someone in Delaware says ‘I’m not a witch!’ and you’re back on track.