clapter comedy

This is a style of comedy that features lines from the comedian designed to elicit affirmative approval from the audience on some social issue, lines which have little comedic value.  Tina Fey commented that you could just as well put up a sign in front of the audience and get that response.  She also attributed the coinage of the word to her friend Seth Meyers of Sunday Night Live.

There seems to be general agreement that dishing out clapters is lazy comedy.  It’s pretty easy to entertain right-wing crowds with right-wing ideas disguised as ‘jokes’, and left-wing crowds with left-wing ‘jokes’.  To weave through a right-wing crowd and get them laughing at  criticisms of right-wing thinking — that is harder.  But that is true comedy.

Clapter is a combination of clap applaud and a rarely used suffix these days -ster as in hipster, funster, reduced to -ter.  This suffix makes a noun out of whatever precedes it — hip (with it), fun and clap.