Bill Burr Says Right-Wing Stand-Ups Have Their Own Version of ‘Claps Over Laughs’ Comedy

Claps should never be louder than laughs during a stand-up set, but the sound of liberals applauding their own political beliefs is still less upsetting than the stomps of combat boots in Indianapolis.

Both sides of America’s political divide have their own version of pandering, pathetic, validate-my-worldview “comedy” that makes everyone besides the target audience roll their eyes. Back during the George W. Bush era, when every left-leaning stand-up was trying to cash in on the popularity of The Daily Show, then-Saturday Night Live writer Seth Meyers coined the term “clapter” to describe the applause that easy dunks on an unpopular President earned in clubs across America’s most purple-haired, bleeding-hearted metropolitan areas. 

When Bill Burr shoots his specials, he prefers to play in front of a mixed crowd of conservatives and liberals in order to avoid the trap of affirming anyone’s politics on either side, because, as he explained during a recent interview with Variety, the far right that has taken over much of the stand-up industry in 2025 also has their own version of “clapter.” 

According to Burr, you know a comic is doing a conservative-pandering set when their fans say that they “tell it like it is.” Burr says that, whenever he hears that “compliment” from a conservative-leaning fan, he thinks, “Oh god, I tell it like it is? That’s code for racist!”

Hilariously, before Burr's friends Joe Rogan and Tony Hinchcliffe hijacked the American stand-up comedy scene and skewed it toward a far-right audience, Burr used to be the gold standard of “tells it like it is comedians,” given how gleefully he went after hyper-sensitive liberals whose cultural power peaked in the mid-to-late Obama years. For that reason, conservative comedy fans who were biding their time until A-list, stadium-playing comedians would go after transgender people and immigrants again believed that Burr was on their side of the budding culture war.

But after Burr began blasting the hypocrisy of Donald Trump and his buddies while singing the praises of alleged billionaire-killers like Luigi Mangione, conservative comedy fans turned on Burr and lobbed personal attacks at the comedian, blaming what they perceived to be a leftward shift in Burr’s political leanings on his wife Nia Renee Hill. Many of the attacks on Burr and his wife, who is a Black woman, have been racial in nature, proving Burr’s point that the kinds of angry white guys who like “tell it like it is” comedy are the same crowd who greet each other with Elon Musk's “heart-sending gesture.”

Unfortunately for them, Burr no longer “tells it like it is,” now that the political majority he’s ripping is the one that wants to erase Black Americans from the history books and stop educators from talking about “how bad slavery was.” I guess the right-wing comedy crowd only wants to hear how it is when it’s another racist white guy doing the telling.