COMEDY REVIEW : A Capital Evening With the Capitol Steps

Melody: “We Are the World.” Lyric: “We Arm the World.”

On Tuesday evening, not long after the deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait passed, a packed house at Caltech’s 1,170-seat Beckman Auditorium sang “We Arm the World” in unison with the Capitol Steps, visiting from Washington.

“We arm a few/Who in a future day/Will leave us tremblin’,” sang the Pasadena crowd.

It was the first Southern California public appearance for the Steps, a band of current and former congressional aides who have achieved a degree of nationwide fame by singing clever topical lyrics to familiar tunes over National Public Radio. And it coincided with one of the most potentially newsworthy nights of the year.

“We may wonder if tonight is the best time for comedy,” noted Caltech physics professor Murray Gell-Mann, introducing the group one hour before the fateful deadline. “The way I look at it, we have one hour. . . . “ The Steps, he said, would “help us enjoy that last hour before we’re all in deep doo-doo.”

However, the deadline came and went without note by performers or audience. Asked after the show if the group had prepared special material in case fighting actually broke out, Steps member David Lee Werner--who also served as the evening’s warm-up comic--quipped that “we’d break out the war-breaking-out song.”

But seriously, folks, he defended the idea of joking about the Persian Gulf situation in song, even while war might be starting, noting such historical precedents as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

“If tough times come,” said Werner, “Americans will respond with the best humor, done with good taste, that they can.”

At first glance, the Steps look extremely tasteful, almost like an Up With People or Young Americans-style group. However, much of their comedy arises from the fact that they don’t particularly honor the notion of “good taste,” as well as from their juxtaposition of comfortable old tunes with wry, cutting lyrics.

They swat all comers. To the tune of “Camelot,” Sadaam Hussein sings about “My Camel Lot.” In a moon-June lyric, George Bush’s plan “to fill the sky with rockets” is what he means by “a thousand points of light.” Congress in general--and the Keating Five and Jesse Helms in particular--are targets, as are Drexel Burnham, HUD and Dan Quayle.

The Caltech crowd was not spared. In an adaptation of “California, Here We Come,” the school was credited with “dweebs, geeks and nerds.” Baby boomers take their lumps in an acerbic transformation of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” into “Like a Suburban Drone.”

For their live show, the Steps add a few easily mobile props, costumes and wigs, and occasional moments of spoken satire, though no real sketches. Some of them have genuinely impressive singing voices. But they don’t attempt to act--in the way that many of the local comedy troupes do.

Not every selection was consistently on the nose, but the group’s professionalism never flagged. It was a scintillating way to usher in a war.