Both Hands, Over Your Head, Arf! Arf!

Clapping is painful (We’ve never pretended our wrist aren’t delicate, have we, Dar-ling?) and usually overblown. Something people do to assure themselves that the experience is at least as good as all the unclapped for pleasures: good painting, clean snow, strange plants, old buildings, crisp onion rings, and water just fizzy enough to seem like it could take you.

No where is this clearer than in classical music concerts, where shouts of Bravo! or Brava! are virtually required, and the clapping—well, it just gives us the vapors.

We admit: the seven times in our lives when people have clapped for us are great gooey memory sticks. We lean on them in feeble moments. But the showers afterwards do no good: You cannot touch pitch, our Editorial Hero Anthony Trollope often reminds us, without being defiled.

So we’d like to begin Dour with this request: no more extravagant clapping, please. Or rather: lot’s more extravagant clapping, provided it flows from extravagant (self-obliterating?) pleasure.