Elaina Newport, the producer of the Capitol Steps, put down her poison pen long enough to have a conversation with AllPolitics' Thomas H. Moore about what it's like to run a political comedy troupe in Washington.

Q: What does the average week look like for you guys?

A: I don't know if this is average, but, for example, this week we've got a National Public Radio special going up this weekend on the satellite, and probably about eight shows this week, and we've also got a show in San Francisco opening on July 10, which means we have to write a lot of San Francisco material. So, the average week is generally exhausting for the Capitol Steps.

Q: How many of you are full-time?

A: Pretty much everybody in the troupe is full-time now. Some people held onto their day jobs by a thread, and then the bosses started noticing we weren't showing up most days because we were travelling so much. [laughs] You'd only actually get away with that if you were actually a member of Congress.

So a few people have day jobs, but for the most part, the people in the Capitol Steps are doing this full-time.

Q: And that's 20 folks?

A: About 20. It sort of depends on how you count and whether you count piano players and people who are kind of part-time and that sort of thing. But 20 is a good guess.

Q: Have you had anyone retire from the Steps?

A: Yeah, we've had a few people leave -- running from the law, basically. Most people who leave the Steps have either left the area to take another job or run off and get married or something. Most people sort of stay with us forever.

Q: When you do your New York shows and your San Francisco shows, are those D.C. folks who are camping out out there?

A: Yeah, that's right.

Q: Do you see this as a sort of long-term franchising of the idea?

A: No, we kind of have to be near the source of much of our material and we are a Washington-based troupe. We've been sending people out on these extended runs to New York and San Francisco, and that's still the plan for the future.

Q: Are you going to be anywhere else anytime soon?

A: Oh, we do tons of shows; on our Web site we list all the places we're going to be. But as far as an extended run, New York and San Francisco have been our two experiments on that. We thought about Minot, North Dakota, but ...

Q: Is this considered a perk to go out to San Francisco?

A: Yes, oh, yes. San Francisco's a great town. Very funny. There's just tons of stuff going on. Just to give you some idea: Apparently, the tour buses are now going to the S&M clubs.

I was trying to imagine, though, what do you do, if you find that your kid went to an S&M party without you knowing, how do you punish them? Do you spank them? Or is that what they really want?

Q: ...or do you not spank them.

A: Yeah, like, "I'm going to be nice to you."

Q: Who writes your songs?

A: Well, the songs are all written from within the troupe. I write a bunch of them, Bill Strauss writes a bunch of them, Mike Tilford, Brad Van Grack. Bill and I write a lot of them, but everybody in the troupe has ideas, like the Euro Disney song, Mike Tilford helped write, the Hebron song, Brad Van Grack helped write.

Q: How do you do your recruiting?

A: We have actual ads in the paper every once in a while. We still have the Capitol Hill schtick, so we find people who have worked on the Hill. It's a lot of word of mouth, people find us, too, because we've been around for 16 years now.

Q: Do you have any ringers? You know, they were an intern for a month and then want to be a Capitol Step, or have most people had a real honest-to-God career on the Hill?

A: Oh, no, some people had envelope-stuffing jobs in college, but it's all levels. We have everyone from chief counsel on a subcommittee to mail-room clerk.

Q: How many times have you told the three wise men and a virgin joke?

A: [laughs] Six hundred and forty one.

Q: It seems to be irresistible...

A: I know, it is! And it's funny, because people still laugh, and I'm so tired of it. I don't always tell it, and then somebody else pipes up with it, and they get all the hysterical laughter, and I go, "I should have told it!"

Q: Of the numbers you do, what's been the most enduring one? Has there been one that just hangs out for years and years?

A: I would have to say -- I have to mention this since this a Web site interview -- that the song about finding love on the Internet has been around for years. A lot of times we can't do a song for that long. Bob Packwood leaves the Senate, you've got to retire the song, Dan Quayle gets un-elected ... but nerds endure.

Q: You do a number of Bob Dole numbers; how long can you milk Bob Dole before he has to be put out to pasture?

A: You can do it as long as somebody's in the headlines. We're kind of debating right now about the Pat Buchanan number that we've had for about a year. When he was running for president, it was a big hit. But it's tougher now; he's still on Crossfire, does that make him still in the news or not? You kind of gauge after a while, even if someone's still hanging in the news, is the audience still laughing at the song? And the audience is always the last judge.

Q: Have you ever had songs that just went out for one night and were never seen again?

A: Oh, absolutely, yes! Dying grisly, terrible deaths. We had a song recently we tried to do, a Texas separatist movement number -- this guy was setting up his embassy in West Texas -- we had a song called "Home of the Strange," [set] to "Home on the Range." We tried that once, and we got sort of, stares, and we retired that one.

Q: You guys try to be mean to everyone; do you ever have spirited debates over the partisanship of your songs?

A: Well, we have debates over what's funny, that's for sure. And it's actually pretty tough, because sometimes on an issue you're not sure people can laugh at it at all. Like, you don't know if the whole Hale-Bopp thing, you know, can people laugh at that because there was suicides and all that, you sort of keep an eye on Jay Leno, and you kind of keep an eye on the jokes that are coming around the offices. You get a sense after a little while whether people think that these guys are just so ridiculous that they're willing to laugh, or not.

Like, the O.J. situation was hard for a couple of years. Because at the heart of that was, of course, a murder and two dead people, and you didn't really want to make fun of anything too close to that. But fortunately you had characters like Kato Kaelin and Johnnie Cochran running around, and they were fun. We did Kato Kaelin trying to be an actor: "The Merchant of Venice Beach." That was one of my favorites, because he was like, "To be or, like, whatever."

Q: In D.C., in the world of political troupes, who's your competition?

A: Well, Mark Russell is the person who paved the way for us. He's a little different, of course, because we're more numerous, so we can actually put a Paula Jones character in the show, where, unless he wanted to put a dress on, he can't really do that. So, he's the closest to what we do, except he's just one person. And then, there's lot of skit comedy troupes around, a lot of groups that do, Second City-kinds of things, that aren't musical. So, we're kind of weirdly in the middle of all that, not quite fish or fowl.

Q: Do you ever write a song, and say to yourselves, "Oh, yeah, this song's going to kick Mark Russell's butt"?

A: No, no, not Mark Russell, because he's been really nice to us. We're like, "Thank you, Mark Russell!" We've done a couple of shows with him. He was so established by the time we started that we were like the little pimple on the back of the elephant. And he's doing as many shows as he ever wants to do ... we're just different.

Q: Have you ever had a situation -- where it's like when TIME and Newsweek run the same cover story -- where a news event cried out so badly to be associated with one song that everybody grabs at it?

A: Yeah, we actually had a couple like that. There was a song called, "We Like That Old-Timer Robert Dole," set to "Old Time Rock and Roll," and then we heard a parody of that, and then we heard through the grapevine that there was somebody else doing it on the radio, and I don't remember who it was, if it was somebody shopping it around to radio deejays or something.

We did "Bye, Bye, Burger," when Burger left the Supreme Court, and Mark Russell did that, too...

But it's spontaneous; that honestly just happens.

Q: When you visualize the world of songs you can grab at and parody, how big is that universe?

A: I don't know. I've got a list of songs in my computer that's over a hundred pages, single-spaced, just listing songs. But not all of those are songs people know. You are limited. You've probably got five or six hundred songs that are really and truly known, you know -- show tunes. Disney is our best source of current stuff; everybody takes their kids, and they know the songs, and they're very singable. We've had trouble parodying "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" songs.

Q: If you were to compare yourselves to some other kind of business, what would it be?

A: [laughs] Let's see. I know what it is. Our interests are diametrically opposed to the best interest of the country; we want things to go wrong, we want things to screw up. So you'd have to compare us to either bankruptcy lawyers, or funeral parlor directors -- people who prey on the misfortunes of others.

Q: You're doing this full-time; you're making a decent living, you're feeding yourselves, you're putting a roof over your head?

A: Yes, yes, yes. In fact, we've persuaded people to leave perfectly respectable jobs -- well, if you call Capitol Hill respectable jobs. Politicians like to say that they've created jobs, so I guess they've created our jobs.