Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Captain Price (2nd Review)
Captain Price [edit source]
Did not go great on VFH, and has been peed on before, but I like another's opinion on this. Indepth as much as possible. - 04:40, May 27, 2011 (UTC)
- First review here if you are interested.--- 00:22, July 11, 2011 (UTC)
Humour: | 6 | The article itself is fairly well put together, and you have lots of good idea, the problem is that there are far too few jokes for the length, and many of the jokes you do make could probably use work, at least in my opinion. Much of the humour stems from how badass Captain Price is, but this isn't inherently funny in itself. There's lots of stuff about him not being able to die, and about him killing hundreds of Germans/Soviets/Arabs/Whatever, but it's difficult to make jokes like this work. It was kind of funny for a while with the whole Chuck Norris thing because people hadn't seen it before, but it's a bit of a dry well in terms of humour these days. It would be great to see you branch out a little here. For instance, at no point do you even seem to consider making fun of CoD or even Price himself. There isn't really any satire in here at all. Even the jokes about "badass-ness" don't mock machoism, but if anything seem to genuinely support it. I'm not here to make anyone re-evaluate their beliefs but I don't quite see the point in making an article on a comedy wiki about how great something is. Praise is very rarely funny.
Another issue with the jokes is that you don't really word them like jokes, most of the time they read as simple statements. The key to making something funny is the way you tell it; it has to be surprising. You can't just say "John Candy was really fat" and expect people to laugh. You have to say something like "John Candy was a kind man; the size of his heart was matched only by the size of his stomach." Obviously that's not a hilarious example, but I hope you know what I mean. I wouldn't recommend just saying "Captain Price kicks a lot of ass", you have to have what comics call a "turn", or a punchline, like in the John Candy line above. To give you an example of what I did like, the joke about him fighting in the war Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was pretty funny because it was a bit more satirical. It might not have been intentional, but there was a glimpse of you making fun of CoD by acting like Modern Warfare was a real war when they've clearly just made it up. I haven't played the game so I may be way off here, but in any case it was still funny. So for a lot of the article there don't seem to be that many jokes, which is obviously a bad thing. You spend a lot of time just describing what happens in the game, or making stories up, I can't tell because as I say I haven't played it. I would shy away from discussing too many specific examples of gameplay/story as it limits your audience and bores those who are familiar with it. There are elements of gamecruft in here too unfortunately, with lines like "this made him the man he is today", which isn't fully explained, and references to other characters who are not properly introduced and probably shouldn't be anyway. It's nice to see you writing so much, but I don't think a comedy article on one fictional character from a game needs to be this long. If you trim some of the unnecessary detail it will redress the balance of content/humour. It would also help to get more jokes in there too, however. One piece of advice I will give you in regards to this is that turning suddenly silly or crude is mostly ineffective in written humour. This line springs to mind: "the fact that someone clogged the toilet with shit and piss still in it". It comes completely out of nowhere and isn't particularly funny for it. Coarse humour can work but when it appears suddenly and inconsistently it generally doesn't. There's no set up here. A prior reference to Price throwing a grenade down their toilet might help matters, but it would probably just be better not to be so coarse. So two points here; jokes need more of a set-up and crudeness is mostly tiresome and overused (unless you're doing it in a really absurd and original way, like this article). |
Concept: | 6 | The concept isn't hugely original but you have enough decent stuff in there to work with. I'd recommend reading other funny game articles to find a more exciting approach to take. There is a featured CoD one, which is pretty good. You have likely already read it, but I'd like to point out that one of the reasons it is funny is that it isn't afraid to attack CoD for its faults. This is something you might want to try here, whether you do it directly or ironically (ie. making out that the subject is amazing but with a subtle undercurrent that reveals it's actually not-so-good).
Another idea: you need a lot more video-game-based humour in here, because aside from a few fleeting references to CoD, it's pretty difficult to tell what this guy is supposed to be from. The article above highlights specific things that are funny about the game, like the way soldiers just magically respawn out of mid-air when they die, for instance. This kind of thing would help your article in a big way because it will no longer just be about some random guy, but will have a strong context that people who don't know the character will be able to follow. |
Prose and formatting: | 5 | There are a large number of grammar gaffes I spotted in here. I will list what I found, but I can assure you there are more there (because by the end I'd kind of stopped looking). Hopefully what I go through here will help, but also convince you to check this more thoroughly yourself. A lot of browsers have spellcheckers and if you're a masochist there's always Microsoft Word. Anyway, take a look at these:
Early History
WWII
After WWII
Before Modern Warfare
So like I said, there's a lot there. I seriously recommend you try reading it out loud to get a better idea of the flow; this will help the prose a lot. A spelling/grammar check wouldn't go amiss either. |
Images: | 5 | Well, there are a severe lack of them in the second half of the article. The ones you do have are good, but I think the captions could be better. Try to tell some witty one-liners in the captions if you can. There's nothing funny about him killing "Russian Commies". |
Miscellaneous: | 6 | The amount of pies I've snuck into people's lockers. |
Final Score: | 28 | If there's anything I've said here that you want me to explain better, or if you want my opinion on anything I might have missed, or even if you're just lonely, please let me know on my talky page and I'll try to help. Keep up the good work and I hope the review is ok. |
Reviewer: | --Black Flamingo 22:35, July 13, 2011 (UTC) |