Art & Creativity Quote by Alfred Jarry

Applause, in Jarry's telling, isn’t the reward for art; it’s the event art gets drafted to justify. The line lands like a small act of sabotage against the pieties of “appreciation.” By flipping cause and effect - the audience “suffers the music” just to reach the catharsis of clapping - Jarry turns the concert hall into a theater of self-congratulation, where noise becomes the real commodity and listening is an inconvenience.

The intent is characteristically Jarry: to expose how bourgeois culture metabolizes shock, beauty, or difficulty into a safe ritual. “Thundering” is not neutral description; it’s a satire of performative enthusiasm, applause as muscular display. The audience isn’t responding to the music so much as to its own presence, its own consensus, the reassuring feeling of being the kind of people who know when to applaud. The joke is cruel because it’s plausible: the ovation becomes a social technology, a way of proving belonging in public without risking a private, complicated response.

Context matters. Jarry’s late-19th-century Paris was a factory for reputation and spectacle, with premières doubling as social combat and publicity engines. He helped invent modern scandal-as-aesthetic with Ubu Roi; he understood that audiences often arrive not to be transformed but to participate in an occasion. This line reads like an early diagnosis of what we’d now call clout culture: the crowd doesn’t just witness the work; it uses the work to stage itself.