Art & Creativity Quote by Harry Shearer

Washington, D.C. gets pegged here as a town so in love with its own theatrics that it mistakes ceremony for punchline. Harry Shearer, a performer who’s spent decades voicing power’s absurdities from the outside, flips the usual civic myth: the Capitol steps aren’t a backdrop for history, they’re an open-mic night where the locals think they’re killing. The jab lands because it’s not just calling politicians dumb or corrupt; it’s accusing them of having terrible taste. That’s a more intimate insult, and it hits a cultural nerve: in an age where politics is constantly staged, the real contest is who controls the laugh track.

The “what are you going to do” opener reads like weary shrug-comedy, the tone of someone who’s tried reason, tried satire, tried plain language, and keeps encountering the same self-satisfied feedback loop. Shearer’s “drag them into the 20th century let alone the 21st” is deliberately ungenerous with time, implying D.C. isn’t merely behind on policy or tech but behind on basic modernity: media literacy, accountability, the ability to hear critique without turning it into performance.

Subtextually, it’s a complaint about audience capture. If the insiders think the steps are “state of the art,” they don’t need new jokes; they need new people. The refusal “to come with you” isn’t confusion, it’s choice - a system opting for ritualized clowning because it’s safer than evolving. In Shearer’s framing, the tragedy isn’t that D.C. can’t be serious. It’s that it can’t stop auditioning.