It must be hard to be a celebrity at an award show. At any moment, if you accidentally make an awkward face or do a silly hand gesture, you might find yourself the subject of the Internet’s fascination.
Just ask Chrissy Teigen if you don’t believe me.
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At the 2017 Oscars, Nicole Kidman originated the ‘weird clap’ meme.
The combination of her brief confusion and the camera lens making her fingers look over-extended lead to the world commenting on her resemblance to The Grinch and joking that she was an alien who never learned how to clap.
The gifs were not kind to Nicole.
Obviously there was some camera lens trickery going on here, because if Nicole Kidman had hands bigger than her head I’m sure we’d have noticed it in her movies before, but the gifs did look funny on Twitter.
Well, move over, Nicole Kidman. There’s a new clapper in town.
Enter Orange is the New Black and Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne, whose applause at The Emmys this weekend was both enthusiastic and strange.
It wasn’t just once. It was every time she clapped.
Every time the camera panned to her, it was like watching poetry in motion. Her giant grin. Her slow claps on her own rhythm. She looked so happy and so confused at the same time.
As this Twitter user pointed out, no two claps were exactly the same.
She’s making big windmills with her claps, sort of like toddlers do when they’re just learning how to do it. One Twitter user suggested she’d only learned what clapping was “5 minutes before the broadcast.”
For her part, Natasha seemed to take it all in stride.
She retweeted a gif of her clapping and joked, “New phone wha happen” as her way of signifying she was confused but amused about becoming one of Twitter’s trending topics.
By the way, Nicole Kidman has explained why she was clapping that like that.
While she was on an Australian radio show , the host said to her, “I believe you were clapping like that because you had the rings on and you didn’t want to damage the rings.”
“You are so right,” Nicole agreed.
“I’m so glad you clarified that because it was really awkward! I was like gosh, I want to clap, I don’t want to not be clapping, which would be worse, right? ‘Why isn’t Nicole clapping?’”
The fear caused her to clap strangely.
“So therefore, I’m clapping but it was really difficult because I had a huge ring on that was not my own, but it was absolutely gorgeous, and I was terrified of damaging it!”
And if we look closely at Natasha Lyonne’s hands…
She also was wearing a lot of big rings to the awards. Maybe she, too, was clapping strangely out of fear of damaging rings.
Of course, she could just be a goofy clapper.
There’s not always a deep or justifiable explanation for doing something weird. Sometimes you just do something weird. We have to accept that.
I’m sure if there was a camera on me every time I clapped, it would catch me clapping like an idiot at least once.
