Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/The Pogues

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The Pogues

Waylander37 13:55, March 2, 2011 (UTC)

Since I can't review Stupid cats yet I guess I'll occupy my time elsewhere. Another English humour article yippee! (talk) 02:54, March 3, 2011 (UTC)

Humour:	4	Party in the UK! This article is rather short, but I still think it deserves a section-by-section humor review as the humor varies significantly depending on the section. Intro Pretty good intro to the article. The spiderman joke falls flat, but some people may find it amusing. The humor in this section especially depends on the reader knowing who the subject is. Generally that isn't advisable with lesser known figures such as these, although I don't know how popular they are in Europe/the UK. It's up to you whether to change the more "in-jokey" jokes to something that everyone will get. Band Members Lists are generally not funny. This list is necessary so putting jokes in it is also necessary. However, the jokes that are in there right now are either random, raunchy, or both. The nicknames are a bit much and really aren't that funny. I would recommend making the jokes more along the lines of "Shane MacGowan - Lead mumbling and former chief reloading specialist." I think that referencing their former and/or current IRA involvement would keep this section relevant and at least a little bit funny. Career This section is where the humor starts to trail off. Many of the jokes are based on taking the real names of albums and/or songs and changing them slightly. The first paragraph is pretty good as the quote and afterward are relevant to the fact that the band members are making music to continue their work from when they were in the IRA. However, after the first paragraph all the humor is random humor. Adding the word sodomy and sexual innuendo to song and album titles isn't as funny as one might think. Generally humor is derived from surprising the reader and having shocking titles isn't a very shocking thing for a punk band to do. If the titles were something like "The best of the My Little Pony soundtrack" then it would be shocking as the point of a punk band is to rebel against such things, so condoning it in a song or album would indeed be shocking. I'm not saying you should do that, but if you're trying to be funny by making the song titles things like "Bum the Girl" it isn't going to work, it's just too expected. In the "next albums" sub-section you seem to escalate the random with mentioning Elvis Presley and them murdering one of the members. This isn't funny either which is something best explained in HTBFANJS. In general when you spend more time on something, it gets more funny. Having Elvis steal their cd then having them shoot someone seems like something you came up with off the top of your head. These things are generally not funny.
Concept:	5	Your article starts off well for an Uncyclopedia article in that it takes something real and puts a twist on it. Unfortunately the idea dies out pretty quickly. There is only one reference to the band being former IRA members in the rest of the very short article, and everything after the intro seems to be random nonsense. My solution would be to make the rest of the article more about how the band attempted to use its music to further the goals of the IRA. In the first section you mention that they could do more damage with their music than with explosive, but you don't say anything more on that. I want to know what they're doing with their music that makes it so destructive. Everything after the first paragraph of "first albums" will probably need to be rewritten in order to make it more consistent with the thesis of the article (i.e. they're ex-IRA memebers) In order to fully realize the potential in this idea you're also going to have to expand the article considerably. Short articles can be just as good as long ones, but in an encyclopedia everything about a band will get documented, especially during the period when they're active. A pretty good example of a band article is the Queen article, which is a little listy, but has a decent amount of text for each album. Another place I would go for inspiration is the wikipedia page for The Pogues in order to get more details that you can then skew to fit your thesis. Of course just copying and pasting text from either of these articles isn't advised as just changing words from other articles generally doesn't make an article funny.
Prose and formatting:	6	This article is formatted pretty well, but it is very short especially for an article with such big pictures. The pictures are so big that they are stacking on top of each other (including the wikipedia template) and forcing the edit buttons for some of the sections to be pushed down. Putting some spacing between these pictures would solve that. Other than that Mhaille seems to have made good adjustments to the formatting that you should stick with. The prose is extremely variable in this article. There are random misspellings that should be corrected with a read through by either you or someone else if anyone is willing to read your article for you (there are people that would be happy to spell check for you.) Most of the awkwardness is in the last section "Next Albums." The second paragraph ends with "...to London. stolen." It looks like you meant to have another sentence there, but didn't edit out that one word. There are a couple word confusions too. The ones I remember are a couple Your and You're changes, Their There and They're confusion, and at least one instance of using to instead of too. If you don't know which one to use either look it up or ask someone. Along with spelling errors there are multiple places where punctuation is missing. As a general rule you need commas before words such as but, and, or and which. You also put commas around fragments of sentences that could be in other places in the sentence. For example, "A rough rider named Billy was seen." could also be "Billy, a rough rider, was seen." If you need more examples of things like this you could probably ask Mhaille, he seems to be willing to help quite a bit.
Images:	7.5	The images that you have right now are pretty good for a band article. The main thing I would work on are the captions. For the first image there isn't a joke there, it's just telling us what the image is of. The second picture's caption doesn't make sense to me. I think what you mean is that the picture is of what the band has contributed to art in the past twenty years. If that is what you meant it's kind of funny, but there is a much less confusing way that can be worded. I would recommend something like "A representation of The Pogues' contribution to music." or something along those lines. If you expand this article adding more black and white pictures would be beneficial as it seems to fit for some reason that I can't really explain.
Miscellaneous:	5.5	Overall "feel" of the article
Final Score:	28	Right now this doesn't feel like a finished article (probably why you came here in the first place) but with some work I can see this being good. Be careful to keep away from adding too many things that people who don't know who The Pogues are won't get.
Reviewer:	(talk)