What are these called?. They’re way too big to be castanets.
Bones.
Ah, yes, the Gong Show, another one of those weird 70s-80s repository of people faintly famous for something they did 10 years previously…
(Message suggesting their being a form of maracas or claves, and not being recognized by conservatory trained percussionist has been withdrawn.)
They probably don’t teach bones in conservatory. People who follow bluegrass and some forms of roots music would be familiar with them.
They are most certainly not maracas, which are filled with stuff and merely shaken to produce sound. And while they could be considered a relative of claves in a very general sense, they way they are played is worlds apart.
Sorry, it seemed superfluous after being ninja’ed on the correct answer. You’d be surprised what is covered in a conservatory program, though.
Probably a whole bunch of stuff that I wouldn’t recognize.
They look like measuring spoons, or at least generic spoons made from wood or hard plastic.
At least that’s my guess.
I re-watched the video again. I was wrong. They are probably bones as previously stated.
At the Conservatory (class of aught six), I did well in Washboard 203 and Intro to Jugs.
Hey, I was a big fan of this show as a kid. I think it was ten times better than American Idol or America’s Got Talent or any of the pretentious, self-aggrandizing, oh-so-important crap amateur-hour/reality shows today! 
Yes, they’re bones. Played the same way as spoons.
Anybody remember the Ted Mack Amateur Hour on CBS, late on Sunday afternoons when you should either have been enjoying the great outdoors or (in the wintertime) taking a nap on the couch?
IIRC, they started out every episode with a chorus line of hot babes from places like Bumfuck, Iowa. What chance these had to make it big in show business, I never understood! 
A while back, probably when he was promoting the film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, I saw Chuck Barris on a morning TV interview. He was very matter of fact about the enormous amount of flack he got for doing The Gong Show back on 70s TV. He felt it was just this silly, goofy, little ‘county-fair’ type talent show (with an occasional witty, subversive bent), and it was competing for ratings (and winning) against such schlock as soap operas & game shows. And yet he was mercilessly criticized by the industry & press as attempting to bring down Western Civilization or something!
He then countered this with a modern article he read about a recent ‘reality’ show in which contestants had to compete against each other by eating a pig’s anus fastest… :eek: