Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/HowTo:Club a baby seal (Revised)
HowTo:Club a baby seal [edit source]
Dancing dude 
04:51, January 31, 2011 (UTC)
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PEE REVIEW IN PROGRESS of giving you his opinion and pretending you care. |
| Humour: | 4 | Hey, there, double Ds.
So, this is kind of a tough one to review. And that's because of the concept. Generally, an Uncyclopedia concept is satirical - like, if you want to make fun of The Bourne Identity movies, you think "What if those INSANE CAMERA EFFECTS and tension-building music were applied to, say, a pottery class?" And then you've got your satire. Occasionally, article are just zany, without being satirical - like "What if Colin Powell kept dropping in to help you with minor things" or "Let's say absolutely mind-bogglingly absurd things about salamanders!" But this concept is neither. It's not satire; it's not goofy; it's just - a guide to beating baby seals to death with a club. I guess the humor is supposed to be that it's inappropriate for such a guide to exist, because it tells you how to do a heartless and horrible thing. But, then, there are about a quarter-million seals hunted every year in Canada alone, of which (if I'm reading this right) about 3% are clubbed to death by traditional Inuit hunters and 7% are clubbed to death by people who think it'd be cool to hunt like a traditional Inuit hunter. So, it's not like you wrote HowTo:Fuck your cat. Seal clubbing is a practice that's legal and widespread, if controversial. Is there a concept besides "An inappropriate how-to guide"? Not really. The guide is actually pretty straightforward; it gives you tips on clubbing a seal. They aren't particularly insightful tips, or bad tips. It's as though the only secondary joke is that the author of the article uses a very casual tone and occasionally goes off on tangents about his personal life. And that, honestly, is kind of a flawed concept. I guess I could write Tangerines and make most of it about how much I hate my ex-wife, but I don't think most Uncyclopedians would enjoy the final product very much. Quick section-by-section runthrough: Lede: Well, seals aren't particularly high in fiber, so this sort of establishes the author as a charlatan right off the bat. In general, I think an article that threatens or beates its audience ("Do it, or you're a pussy!") almost always fails. People don't really appreciate that kind of stuff. What type of club...: Well, this is mostly a long and bizarre story about a guy who was a subsistence seal-meat hunter, whose wife had a full-time job, and she fucked a Swede because he failed to club a seal, so he beat his children. I don't know, man. It's a little too weird and disconnected from reality to be very funny. Where is a good place...: I did get a little smile out of the very nice Canadian officers stuff, and how their handcuffs weren't even "the pinchy kind," so, good job on that. What should I wear: Besides the excessively casual tone, this is just... good advice. Wear warm things in the cold. Is it funny because it's so obvious? I don't know, the joke falls flat for me. The technique: Not always a good idea to label your own article as "crap"; you run the risk that readers might agree with you. Foot placement: It's pretty dry, really. It tells me where to place my feet. The only real joke here is that the reason I want to place my feet correctly is that I don't want to get blood on myself - but then, that's actually a good point, I don't want to get blood on myself. Griping: You were looking for "gripping" or "grip"; the word "griping" means "complaining." And at the end, didn't you mean "instant death by club," not "instant death by seal"? Anyway, this section basically tells you not to hit yourself in the face with the club, which I *guess* is a slapstick joke, but slapstick doesn't work very well when it's the text of a how-to article. Slapstick requires more of a visual medium. Holding the seal: This section actually seems pretty reasonable. You get a better grip with two hands; you can leash or lasso the seal if you only use one hand. Makes sense, right? So what's the joke? Is the joke just that it's kind of terrible to talk about killing seals with clubs?? |
| Concept: | 2 | I covered this - the concept is just problematic. The concept of this article is that the article is just kind of "wrong." But other than that, it's just basically a straightforward, if not-very-useful, guide to clubbing seals.
I think this is kind of the same concept as if I wrote HowTo:Shave your vagina and then just did my best to teach women how to shave their vaginas - not particularly researching the subject, just relaying what I think must be involved in successful vagina-shaving. I mean, is that funny? I don't think it's really very funny. You can have an author-voice concept, sure - like, the author is a pervert, or the author is a raving idiot, or the author has a bizarre fascination with Scandanavians, or whatever. But you haven't really gone that way - your author is just a guy who doesn't seem to be trying very hard. Needs more. |
| Prose and formatting: | 5 | Your formatting looks fine, although I'd switch the position of the baby seal and the HowTo template. The prose is okay for what it is - I don't really like the author's casual, "Okay, here's what I think about seal clubbing, you pussy" tone of voice, but at least it's a consistent tone and it's completely readable. |
| Images: | 7 | The images are appropriate enough and contribute well to the article. Just looking at that nail bat makes me cringe a little. I don't really like the picture of the moose with the false teeth - it looks out of place having such a silly picture in an article where all the other pictures are fairly realistic. |
| Miscellaneous: | 5 | Five, I guess |
| Final Score: | 23 | It's tough to know what to do with an article when the problem lies in its concept. When you have a great concept, it's easy enough to give writing tips and help it go from mediocre to great. But when it's a bad concept, the best writing in the world isn't going to save it.
This isn't a good enough concept. If a featured article deserves to exist at the space HowTo:Club a baby seal, it has to be more than a casually-written guide to clubbing a baby seal. That's not a good enough idea to justify an article. This isn't a terrible article; I wouldn't nom it for VFD or anything. But to get something to feature, you're going to have to go back a ways to the drawing board. Whether that means rewriting most of this article according to a different concept, or just starting a new article afresh with a new concept, I leave to you... |
| Reviewer: |  pillow talk 23:27, February 8, 2011 (UTC)
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