Y'all are rather good at that. Of course, we get plenty of practice here at Toastmasters, the club where you get applause for, well, just about anything. More than that, though, your clapping is so natural and robust that it's like second nature, as if centuries of social tradition has gone into determining how and when you do it. Actually, that's true. Putting one's palms together thusly is an ancient practice, that likely goes back as long as we've had hands. After all, monkeys clap, too. It's a cultural practice, though, which rarely receives its due.
The word applause comes to us from the Latin applaudere, meaning to strike upon or clap. In addition to having a lasting term for the practice, the Romans had a tidy system for doing it, some parts of which may look familiar. In the case of general mild approval, there was finger snapping
Long-suffering Job described a different sort of applause when he explained that the wicked would be driven from their homes by clapping, which clearly had a unique connotation in ancient Hebrew culture.
Ages later, it would be the wrongdoers putting their hands together in the theaters of Gay Paris in the mid-19th-century. Contemporary commentator Emile Sigaud penned a pamphlet that put planted palm-patters out permanently. Claquers, or hired clappers, were employed by actors to set the audience clapping at the right places, making them appear more skilled than they might otherwise.
There are those, though, who believe a clap a day may keep the doctor away. Only a few years ago, in the mid-90s, India saw the rise of a clapping cult of sorts, centered around Krishan Chander Bajaj, who claimed that clapping for 20 minutes a day had cured him of glaucoma, and that it would do the same for other ailments by increasing circulation and breaking up circulatory blockages.
In the modern west, we've developed many variations on customary clapping. Take for example, the civil, understated golf clap
Famed veteran vaudevillian Fred Allan, in his autobiography, Much Ado About Me, recalls an evil slow clap that occurred en masse at an infamous vaudeville venue. It's said that when the regulars started their steady, derisive applause, even the best would lose their nerve and flee the stage.
Just as it might affect the performer, the act of clapping also holds the audience in its thrall. In 1997, The Journal of Epilepsy published a study which noted that the act of clapping produces EEG readings consistent with those of pleasure.
As with many pleasurable activities, the impulse to act often rushes past the speed of thought. In an audience, any individual's move to applaud is barely within their conscious control, and is therefore easily manipulated; hence the effectiveness of the claquers. Case in point, my dear wife, who is even less avid a sports fan than I. About once a year, we will attend a high school football game at the behest of one of her students. More than once, I have had to inform her from that the crowd she's clapping with is rooting for the other team.
According to Steven Conner, author of The Help of Your Good Hands, which provided much of today's background data, the length of a round of applause is roughly proportional to the size of the audience. Even a perfunctory salute at a stadium scale event will outlast an ovation in a smaller theater. Be that as it may, I'll be happy for whatever amount of applause you can muster for me.