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.