Please stop clapping at funerals

00:00 04:38

Ysenda Maxtone Graham has narrated this article for you to listen to.

The Happy Clappies – evangelical Christians who clap along to worship songs during church services – have been around since the 1980s. The slightly derogatory term was coined in 1985, and the practice is still going strong: you can hear it as you walk past any evangelical church on a Sunday morning. But in the past couple of years a new phenomenon has appeared: the Sad Clappies. These are the congregations who erupt into prolonged applause at funerals and memorial services.

It’s rare to go to a funeral or memorial service these days where clapping doesn’t happen. It usually starts after the first of the (often rather too many) tributes. The speaker (son, daughter, grandson, old school friend, business associate) steps down from the lectern, and where there used to be silence, which allowed their words to hang in the air, applause breaks out. The applause gates are opened. Clapping will now happen at the end of every subsequent tribute. And when the great-grandchild gets up to read out a passage from Winnie-the-Pooh, he or she will be swamped with applause too.

Some see this an excellent innovation, ‘striking a much-needed note of celebration’, as one funeral-goer I spoke to put it. The applause is partly for the speaker’s words, and partly for the deceased, so it’s heavily emotionally charged, cathartic applause, and the younger generation love it, as they feel a bit uncomfortable with the churchy solemnity and long for a lightening of the tone and a bit of participation. At the end of George Alagiah’s memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields last July, the Order of Service specifically invited everyone to clap. ‘A final round of applause for George; exactly one minute; cheering allowed.’