Is a neologism for that particularly tedious and unfunny form of comedy which consists more of pandering to your audience's prejudice as opposed to actually, you know, being funny. It's a portmanteau of clapping and laughter.
The BBC seem to specialise in it these days. Whereas once they produced spicy and pants-wettingly hilarious comedies which sent up the pompous and narcissistic and petty authoritarian in brilliant ways, now most of their comedic output relies on clapter. There are no jokes. Just the same tired old lines about how the bete noire of the metropolitan elite of the day is stupid and wrong, and how they are so much better and just know better. It's basically recycling stuff that's trending on Twitter and then loads of canned laughter. It's even worse in America, but I don't really watch American comedies because I like not rotting my brain.
Clapter is popular at the moment, but it isn't new. It's been around longer than you think. Cast your mind back, gentle reader, to the 2000s. A time before Facebook and Twitter, and when the Internet was still actually usable and not just a bunch of corporately controlled echo chambers all pretending to compete but actually acting as a cartel for a static market share. The CRT was slowly giving way to the flatscreen as the latter became good enough and affordable enough, and George W. Bush was in the White House. Now, imagine you are a comedian in that age. You have two choices. On the one hand, you could write some brilliantly incisive material about life in then current year and its absurdities and the social attitudes and shibboleths of the day and how they need a good puncturing. This will take time and effort though. On the other hand, you could be a lazy fucking cunt, and just go, "LOL TEH PRESIDUNT LOOKS LIKE AN APE!!!!1111oneoneoneone" which has been done a million times before, but will cause your audience of coastal middle-classers and wannabe highbrow types to wet themselves in paroxysms of uncontrollable mirth, and whoop and holler and clap like seals at how the ILLEGALLY ELECTED, ILLEGITIMATE, REDNECK, MORON will surely never, ever, recover from this crippling blow. Then follow it up with pretending to choke on a pretzel and congratulations, you've got a lucrative contract to make hideous unfunny news magazine programmes and can retire at 40 with well manicured toenails and a firm young girl planted on your face. Go you.
Then years later, you'll appear in some shitbagging YouTube compilation about how "Stunning and Brave Comedian DESTROYS Conservatives!" with all your finest moments where you tell the same fucking material in exactly the same ways again and again and again but phrased ever so slightly differently for six, whole, serieses. You need never work again.
Fast forward to the 2010s and you can do the same but with Brexit voters. Lol, they voted to LEAVE EUROPE. They must be all thick as mince, amirite? They all are working class and white van men and football fans, right? They are so stupid they fell for Nigel Farage and besides, have you noticed how they all look like gammon? I mean, what's wrong with them? Why can't they have liberal arts degrees, listen to Radio 4, and be more middle class, like what we are? Why do they oppose uncontrolled mass migration? I mean, have they not thought who will pour their coffee in Pret, right? Right? Ugh. Spare me. This was constant and still is. Oh look, Boris Johnson wrote a spicy newspaper column years and years ago. Let's quote it out of context and laugh at how this person is Prime Minister. Hahahahahahahahaha. Da capo! Da capo! I mean, really. Holy Shit. How will he ever recover from this crippling blow?
Meanwhile, those of us who pay the television licence (which I have never paid because I've used loopholes to consoom BBC content in such a way that doesn't require one and don't own a television anyhow) find this sort of thing smug, unfunny, and worst of all, boring. It does not educate, inform, or entertain. And I'm not having it.
I can see why it's popular though. Real comedy gets you subjected to a digital skimmington ride in current year, and someone has to fill the airtime. In 2020 after the George Floyd protests, many a media outlet went looking for reasons to remove things from their services from yesteryear that no longer passes the Puritanical muster of current year moral guardians, as if stopping people laughing at things has any bearing on racially motivated police brutality 3,000 miles away. Fawlty Towers had the episode "The Germans" binned because it included a sequence where Basil Fawlty asked a black doctor if he was "a real one" and also the Major went on a diatribe about using the wrong racial epithet on the Indian cricket team. Failing to realise, of course, that Basil and/or the Major are the butt of these jokes with their museum-piece racism that was considered stupid and backward even in the casually racist 1970s. The idea was to make the attitudes in question look as ridiculous as they are. It Ain't Half Hot Mum was another victim; apparently something set in British India in the tail end of empire is too spicy for current year even though upon actually paying attention, it's the Indian servants who are really running things and getting things done while the officers are too busy being stupid chinless wonders and the Sergeant Major is a small minded martinet who takes out his frustration at the fact that there will be no place for him after the war is over on the concert party, who do have peacetime prospects post-war. The episode of Only Fools and Horses where Uncle Albert bemoans how "the Paki shop" won't let him have things on tick, even though that was how people in South London in the 1980s spoke, was also binned. Even South Park's episodes 200, 201, and Super Best Friends were memory holed because apparently we've got to treat Muslims with kid gloves in case they murder us (the sheer bigotry of this commonly held attitude should be obvious to everyone, incidentally). There is an attitude now that you can only "punch up" in comedy rather than "punch down," and what is down and up is determined entirely by which groups are preferred by the puritanical metropolitan elites. This is a false dichotomy. It is also massively hypocritical, as tweaking the nose of those self appointed moral guardians who deem everything "problematic" and -ist and -phobic sends them into crybullying rages about how they're being harassed and then they send themselves death threats on Twatter for sympathy and stir up a lynchmob against you. As such, there is in comedy an ever shrinking "safe" list of acceptable targets, and there's only so much material that you can have about those safe targets before it becomes repetitive and boring.
Thus, clapter.
(It also doesn't help that Americans in particular cannot laugh at themselves. Pant-wettingly funny Australian comedian Kevin Bloody Wilson once said that if an American walked into a darkened room and fell over a chair their reaction would be "whut muthafucka put that thurrr," while if a Brit or an Aussie did the same, they'd be all "you dozy cunt, you should have put the bloody light on." The United States of America is so po-faced it is hard to believe.)
Personally, I think nothing should be above mockery. I will happily laugh at our ineffectual wet fart of a Prime Minister as the next person, so long as it is original, and so long as it is funny. If, however, you're just trying to get clout by showing off another sixth form common room level political gag, for the fifteenth time that evening, and then getting butthurt that your audience think it is boring and stupid, and boo you off, well, oh dear, how sad, never mind.
(IRON NODER 2023 #16)