In Popular Culture
- In the 1989 film Uncle Buck, the title character uses The Clapper to turn on the lights in his apartment
- In the pilot episode of Tyler Perry's Meet The Browns, Leroy Brown talked about how he went to a store and asked an employee if the store were selling The Clapper. Brown, however, referred to The Clapper as "The Clap".
- In the 2006 film, Night at the Museum, when Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is at the Job agency presenting his resume, he mentions that he created "The Snapper", and that "The Clapper" stole "a bit of his thunder".
- In the 2003 dark comedy, Duplex, Alex (Ben Stiller) installs the clapper in Mrs. Connelly's TV so that he can turn it off from his apartment below by clapping. One night the two of them go back and forth in a clapping battle, Alex turning her loud TV off, and Mrs. Connelly turning it back on, and back off, and then back on, etc.
- The Clapper appears in Bruce Almighty where God clapped off the lights, then recites "The Clapper" jingle.
- In the 19th episode of The Simpsons“ ninth season, titled "Simpson Tide" originally aired on the Fox network on March 29, 1998, a reference to "The Clapper" is made where Homer tells his wife Marge that "We live in a highly technological age where fighting a war is as simple as turning off a light!" then proceeds to clap with his hands... and the light remains on.. he continues clapping while Marge says "We don't have a clapper" the gag ends with the lamp flying out the window to turn it off.
- In the 1999 comedy Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Austin Powers (Mike Myers) claps twice to activate the "seduction lighting" in his apartment. An impressed Ivana Humpalot (Kristen Johnston) asks "When did you get ze Clapper?". Austin, thinking she means "the clap" replies "Dutch East Indies, shore leave."
- A possible mention of this was in Big Miracle. When a person makes a speech to free the whales, a Russian person says that if the people clap their hands, the person giving the speech would stop talking.
- In the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen film "Passport to Paris", the twins clap their hands- turning off the lights.
- In The Big Comfy Couch, Loonette and Molly clap their hands twice to turn their big lamp on and off.
- In The Avengers, the lights turn on and off when Hulk punches Thor.
Read more about this topic: The Clapper
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
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“I am glad of this war. It kicks the pasteboard bottom in of the usual good popular novel. People have felt much more deeply and strongly these last few months.”
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“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)