I recently went on a business trip to Thailand with our company President, A, and his brother, B. While there, A and B’s friend, J, took us to dinner on a couple of nights. The amount of Thai food we had was so much, I was sick by the third night that I headed to MacDonald’s by myself. They had the most tasteless fries I’ve ever tried.
But that aside, the Thai food we had was awesome. They tasted so good, both A and B were clapping away. That looked odd to me. Imagine having dinner with someone, and they suddenly say, “The food is very good! Wow, Thailand!” and they start clapping. That happened a few times and I just couldn’t wrap my head around that form of expression.
On the last day, while on the way to the airport, we dropped by J’s brother’s cafe and car wash place which looked really beautiful. It looked so beautiful, A and B were like, “Your cafe is very nice” and they started clapping again. In my mind, I was like “Why are you clapping?” How is clapping a form of response to a delicious dinner or someone’s beautiful cafe? If anything, any applause toward something that is not a performance is just demeaning. It feels like, “Well done, kiddo! Keep up the good work!”
That reminded me of the time when I was in secondary school and while gathered at the assembly hall, the discipline mistress went up stage to give a talk. When she was done and heading down the stage, everyone clapped. That made the discipline mistress stop in her tracks and she headed back to the microphone and said, “Why are you clapping? Am I performing? Was that a performance? Don’t clap.”
I couldn’t understand that back then and thought she was just being an ass. But as I get more opportunities to talk in front of people, I grew to understand why she said what she did and it does feel very odd to be given applause for something that is neither a performance nor a speech.
Perhaps it was their way to express the level of amazement they feel in a language that is not their own. After all, they were trying to communicate in English and it was so delicious that the word “delicious” was not enough to show how tasty they think it was.
I’ve never tried to clap when trying to communicate severity of any thought or emotion to someone who doesn’t share a common level of a language.
Do you clap?
I do clap once when a joke is hilarious, though I am not sure if that counts.. lol but I think the most common clapping, apart from clapping at the end of a performance, is for sarcasm. The famous Kim Jung Un come-i-clap-for-you. lol
I think clapping when a joke is funny is normal. You see that at stand-up comedies, and comedies are performances. Even when I watch movies and if the joke is very funny, I clap too because I find the joke so good, it had to be applauded. A Japanese TV program actually did an experiment and concluded that clapping for jokes is actually an influence by media. In the past, comedies on TV only had canned laughter, and canned clapping only came in the past couple of decades. So when they showed a group of elderly people a comedy, the audience merely laughed but never clapped. Then, they showed the same comedy to a group of young people in their 20s, almost everyone clapped as they laughed.
But everything else, it’s maybe the Kim Jung Un meme clap. lol
I clap when it’s very very funny, a real movie scene etc.. Never clapped when food is really good, but can imagine it must have looked odd from a 3rd perspective.. lol
I do that, too! When something is very funny, I clap as well but like you said, clapping when food is good feels funny.
The clapping can sometimes be done in a very sarcastic manner, like the case of your discipline Mistress- I think it is intended to get her off the stage, to tell her tt her time on stage was up. It happened in my secondary school as well.:/
It can also mean “walau, like tt also can” way of clapping. But in the Japanese’ context, it probably just mean appreciation.
Actually, I remember we used to clap after every talk by the principal or whomever on the stage. So we clapped only after she said she was done and while heading down the stage. It wasn’t a sarcastic one.
Hmm… my principal or whoever on the stage has never said she/he was done though. We clapped when we thought it was long enough (speech usually last ard 1hr) and finally a pause (stop), but the person was still on the stage though. Inevitably rude, but effective in shortening a long and boring speech. :p
I think we clapped because she said “Thank you.”
LOL