Pointless stories are met (in English) with the withering rejoinder, “So what?” Every good narrator is continually warding off this question; when the narrative is over it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say, “So what?”’
William Labov, Language in the Inner City, Pennsylvania PA, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972, p. 366.
The best thing, of course, would be to make you laugh. I long to provoke laughter. The best thing ever said about my writing, in a review of an article about the serious topic of eighteenth-century domestic servants’ and slave-servants’ encounters with the law, was that ‘she is often very funny’. Your laughter would be the obverse of ‘so what?’. Laughter would show that we had both got it–had really got the point–that writer and reader were on the same page. It would spell communication; we would be at one, ‘So what?’ gone, banished. Wanting to be funny is a heterodox impulse for a historian. Historians have been warned since the mid-eighteenth century ...
