Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Nilsson

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Nilsson

A Nilsson article has been created...but It's considered ugly. Any way to fix this?MrCleveland 17:26, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

PEE REVIEW IN PROGRESS Hyperbole is engaged in the dual processes of giving you his opinion and pretending you care.

Humour:	3	Hey, Mr. Cleveland! Sorry this Pee Review took us a month to get too. We managed to get a little behind. Anyway, to answer your question, yes, there is a way to fix this. I'm going to take this section-by-section. Lede - This article needs a lede. You'll notice that (nearly) every article on Wikipedia begins with one, maybe two paragraphs that define and summarize the article. So, you'll want a sentence like "Harry Nilsson Wilson III (1941-1991) was an American songwriter, singer, alcoholic and pyromaniac. Despite releasing dozens of albums and singles over a career spanning two decades, almost no one has heard of him." Something like that. But a bit longer. Early years - I like this. Obviously, a Nilsson lyric. Although, for people to get the joke, they'll probably have to either A) know this song; or B) look up Nilsson to even see that he's a songwriter. Which is another reason that you should point out in the lede that he is a songwriter. L.A. Bound - This section is too short - short sections make an article look like all header and no content, which is part of the "ugliness" issue. More to the point, I don't see the humor in this section. Calling Walt Disney an anti-semite (is that true? I don't remember) just isn't all that funny. Everybody's Talkin - This section is way too random. It feels like the writer ran out of ideas - "Okay, now let's put him in the Beatles! Okay, now let's put him in porn!" It really doesn't satirize Nilsson himself, since you could write this about any subject in the world ("Luke Perry was in the Beatles, then in porn", etc.) and it would be equally satirical. As in: not satirical. Downfall - this section, frankly, is very bad. It makes two mistakes. 1) It exists solely to promote your other article and to create a "walled garden" of your articles, where articles are related to each other, but for no reason other than that they are written by you. 2) It breaks the #1 rule of satire: all funny satire must exist in a coherent universe. The least coherent universe is the one where all pop-culture icons are real - where Chuck Norris and Mario go to a tea party with Cthulu and Margaret Thatcher. There's no reason for a cartoon character to be in any article about a musician, with the possible exception of Paula Abdul and M.C. Scat Cat, or Archie and the flesh-and-blood incarnation of Josie and the Pussycats. In conclusion: get Loopy out of this article. Death - This is better. The repetition from the "Early years" section is amusing. Nilsson Ratings - ehhhh. This is being used as a throwaway joke here, which is creating a short section and some ugliness. I think this should either be far more central to the article or not in here at all. Discography - This is the section that primarily earned the article the ugliness template. Long lists are ugly and almost never funny. This one is not an exception. There's arguably a joke with the "I'm not making another album" album and the "I mean it this time" album, but that joke could be incorporated into the prose of another section. After all, the article does have a problem with short sections.
Concept:	4	This article wants to satirize Nilsson, but doesn't seem to have a clear idea of how to do it. It's not satire to stick him in a Disney studio, stick him in the Beatles, stick him in porn, stick him in a cartoon. That's just taking a Nilsson cutout and posting him on different backgrounds; "Nilsson standing in front of the Great Pyramids" is not very funny. The article badly needs a central, unified theme that actually makes fun of actual traits of the artist and/or his career.
Prose and formatting:	5	The prose could use some touchups; one thing I'm noticing is that the average sentence length is pretty short, giving it kind of a choppy feel. The formatting, obviously, was ugly, but that can be fixed.
Images:	7	They seem okay to me.
Miscellaneous:	4	Four.
Final Score:	23	I think, in large part, this one has to go back to the drawing board. I don't know anything about Nilsson's music or career, but I can see that this article isn't really about them, and it needs to be. Articles are always at their funniest when they're strongly connected to their subject material; it's the reason that Robert Mugabe got featured and Ozzy Osborne no longer exists. So, take a few minutes, think about Nilsson, think about what's funny about him, and then make fun of him. Sorry again for the very late Pee Review, and good luck!
Reviewer:	pillow talk 17:21, 28 October 2008 (UTC)