WHOO!

Whooping seems to be back. Shouting ‘whoo!’ as a way of expressing your enthusiasm. Either that, or it never went away and I have grown inured to it. Explain it how you will, but after five whooping experiences in the last three weeks - one at a concert, one at a play, two at anniversary parties and one at Passover - I can now say definitively that I’m hearing it again. Did I say whooping at Passover? All right, I think whooping at Passover, but I can’t recall - or don’t choose to recall - which part of the service was being whoo’d.

I noted this to my wife, saying it would make a good rancid rant for Substack. ‘You have already written it,’ she said kindly, not wanting me to think I was ageing even more rapidly than we feared.

I went through my papers. ‘Whoo!’ I shouted when I discovered she was right, though the piece predates my articles for Subtack But I see no reason why you shouldn’t read it now. So here it is, the first part free, the second behind a pay wall so you can whoo in more select company….

ARE YOU WHOOPING AT ME?

Of the afflictions visited on contemporary man, whooping might not be the worst but it vies with mosquitoes to be the most annoying.  Not whooping as in the cough, I mean whooping as in shouting 'whoo!'   Originating, if I am not mistaken, on the comedy circuit, as an alternative to laughing, it has spread to political rallies, after-dinner speeches, weddings - a best man's speech is a particular provocation to whooers - and even funeral orations.  'Man is like to vanity: his days are as shadow that passeth away' - Whoo!

It is tempting to imagine whooping police forcibly removing offenders from public places - three whoos and you're out - but our cultural life is subject to prohibitions enough.  Our fingers are already too itchy on the ban and boycott trigger.  So if people want to whoop to show their appreciation, we must shut our ears and let them. The mystery to me - as an inveterate non-whooper - is why they want to.

When exactly whooping first migrated to this country is a question for historians of popular frenzy.  The one thing I'm sure about is is that we didn't always do it.  There was no whooping when I was a boy.  We put our hands together decorously in the fifties; sometimes - though very rarely - we cheered; even more rarely we shouted encore or, if we were at the opera, bravo; and then we trooped home quietly.  'Had a good night, son?'  'A passably good night, mother?'  'Did you clap?'  'Yes, a bit.'  'I hope you didn't clap too hard, you'll get tendinitis in your fingers.'  'I was careful, mother.'

I was taken to see Johnny Ray at the Ardwick Empire when I was about twelve and I recall seeing grown women crying and tearing their hair, but there was no whooping.  A scream is not a whoop.  You can feel worried for people who scream easily but you don't want to punch them.  There was no whooping for the Beatles or the Rolling Stones either, though many in the audience had to be carried out suffering nervous exhaustion or even brief reactive psychosis, otherwise known as hysteria, which of course means wandering uterus. 

Throughout the sixties, no matter how far uteruses wandered, whooping remained confined to America.  It was the most distinctive marker of our cultural difference.  We loved America movies and bopped to American music, but couldn't for the life of us fathom why Americans whooped at all, or what they found to whoop about in the leaden banter of late-night chat-show hosts in tailor's-dummy suits.