Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/The Jesus Laws
The Jesus Laws[edit source]
Sliferjam wrote this page back in 2007, and I helped touch it up. It got reviewed three times in one go when it got put on Pee Review, once by me. The article did not survive VFH for some reason, and was since lost to the mists of obscurity; it hadn't been edited since Brad pulled the VFH tag in June 07. I think this article still has some real potential, though, and is definitely front-page worthy. To this end I went in and gave it a bit of a general cleanup, trying to make the article look a little more presentable and funny. I'd like to VFH it again, but I figure it's best to get a review on it first.
Andorin Kato 11:41, November 16, 2009 (UTC)
I'm in here now. 24 hours. --ChiefjusticeDS 13:53, November 19, 2009 (UTC)
| Humour: | 7 | Your humour is certainly enjoyable and was good enough to keep me interested in your article all the way through. There are a couple of things that you can do to improve it, however. The first thing I noticed was the lack of context in the article, you begin your article simply with "My fellow Americans". Now, while this is fair enough I think that it doesn't tell the reader enough about who is talking. I assumed it must be a Politician since the American populace do not vote on legislation, Congress does. I think that if you put the article in context you can not only throw in a couple of extra jokes, but the existing jokes will also have more of an effect on the reader. You could experiment with different ways of adding context, for example you could imply that the speaker is being paid by figures in industries that Jesus would put out of business to discredit the idea. I would also encourage you to play on the idea of the speaker essentially being a voice for hire if you are going to user that idea.
The other problem that I noticed was that some of the jokes in the wording of the laws themselves seem a bit weak, case in point is the one on curing the sick: "and anyone attempting to perform such acts will be injected with polio". While the joke is reasonable it feels weak on the end of this section and it brings the reader to a jarring break in tone and humour style, my advice would be to stick to real life punishments for these instances, as by saying things like "shall be spanked forthwith" and "It's just gross" you are damaging the believability of the article. It is blatantly obvious that these aren't real punishments, I found that the parts of the article where I could think "I can imageine someone saying that" were the best and this makes it harder to enjoy the conclusions to sections. |
| Concept: | 7 | Your concept is good and a very original idea. Your execution is equally good but is found lacking in a couple of areas. The first of these areas was, as mentioned above, the tone at the end of the law extracts. If these are extracts from the proposed Jesus laws try to make them a bit more professional, it will be easy enough for the reader to find the joke in the laws if they are done like this. You do this successfully at times in the article , here for instance: "Water (H20) shall not at any time be magically, technologically, or naturally transmogrified into wine, rum, vodka, wine coolers, or any liquor". That is an excellent use of the tone and I would urge you to expand it. The other problem that I found was in the speakers tone, now while I think the informal style is excellent and for the most part is very well done, there was a part that stood out to me. Since we are unsure who the speaker is, I was assuming he was a Politician and I would advise that you try to keep the language to that which a politician would use, using colloquialisms like "Freak out" brings a jarring halt to this tone and once again left me confused as to where the narrative was coming from. |
| Prose and formatting: | 9 | Your prose are pretty good and in my cursory look I was hard pressed to come up with any errors worth complaining about with your spelling and grammar. That said I would suggest that you go back and proofread carefully, pay particular attention to your sentence structure as there are a couple of problem areas. Besides that your formatting is pretty good. My main advice on it would be to spread the pictures that are in the middle of the article out a bit so that they aren't squeezing the text in, while they are only doing it slightly at the moment it is always worth just tidying things up slightly. You may also want to consider making the pictures slightly larger, they are quite small right now. |
| Images: | 9 | You lose a mark here for the above formatting difficulties. Your images themselves are very good, and the captions on a couple amused me greatly. My advice would be to make sure any humour changes are carried across to the captions. Otherwise very good. |
| Miscellaneous: | 8 | My overall grade of the article. |
| Final Score: | 40 | A very enjoyable article that on the face of things I thought I would have a real hard time reviewing, ultimately it turns out that there are some problems with the article that become apparent once one delves deeper into the text, and it is your job to try and sort these problems. If you need any other help, or if you have questions please leave them on my talk page. Good luck making any edits. |
| Reviewer: | --ChiefjusticeDS 12:47, November 20, 2009 (UTC) | |