Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/UnNews:Direct China-Taiwan fights begin

Main

Current

Reviewed

Archive

Guidelines

FAQ

Committee

RotM

UnNews:Direct China-Taiwan fights begin

BRITNAY SPEERS --Sir General Minister G5 FIYC UPotM [Y] #21 F@H KUN 11:31, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Humour:	3	Okay, there are several problems with this article. Here they are, in no apparent order. The joke is hard to get. The title, "Direct China-Taiwan fights begin," looks like a badly-worded headline announcing a China-Taiwan war. It doesn't necessarily look like a typo wherein the "l" was left out of "flights." I know that I didn't go there when I read it, and I ended up reading the entire article thinking "What in the living hell is going on here?" Then I read the source, and thought "aahhhh okay it's a pun." - which wasn't exactly a massive comedy payload. If this article is going to work, it's going to have to be a lot more apparent what it's about. For example, perhaps it could open with a line about how a journalist omitted a letter from his headline, causing the United States to go into DefCon 4 and issue a "puce" terrorism warning. I don't know. There are other, possibly better, ways to do it. But it has to be done. It's just incoherent. Passages like "Claiming that China is significant, Taiwan's itty-bitty coverage on defense and attack, TIBCDA, had chosen to make China less-significant and claimed war on China" or "forcing China to take hand the plan of connecting the two countries" just don't make sense. I don't know what any of that means. It's plausible. China could declare war on Taiwan. Taiwan wouldn't be likely to return the favor, but that's kind of a minor detail. The plausibility here is unfortunate, because the headline becomes the equivalent of something like "Israel invades Lebanon, citing terrorism concerns" - an article we could see in tomorrow's paper isn't exactly the pinnacle of satire. On the other hand, there are a few grins to be found in here. "There is a 99.99% chance that China will win, although there may be a small chance that China will lose" is amusing, just because it's so deadpan. "Wang Yi claims that if the two become one, chances are, that China will, in fact be bigger. Many have claimed that China may even become smaller as Taiwan is a part of China, due to Taiwan's small size" needs a proofread, but it's a solid joke. "Japan, entirely ignoring the event, has invented an unrelated invention known as "Searmuffs", which will help people search the Sears supermarket faster" - jokes about the Japanese fascination with inventing ridiculous crap are pretty common around here, but I never seem to get tired of them.
Concept:	4	I kind of covered this in the above section. The concept is basically that an article about direct flights was actually about "direct fights." There might be something to work with there - might being the key word. But if it's going to work, the article has to let the reader know, immediately, that this is a joke about "flights" being mistaken for "fights."
Prose and formatting:	2	There's no nice way to say this: the prose is a complete mess. Almost every sentence contains one (or far more) usage errors. There are so many errors that fixing them would be tantamount to rewriting the whole article. I'm thinking it might be a good idea to run articles by the Uncyclopedia:Proofreading Service before taking them to Pee Review; although Pee Reviewers are happy to point out up to maybe half a dozen mistakes they find in an article, the system just isn't set up for a job of the scope this article needs.
Images:	3	The images are taken directly from the source, and here they fail for the same reason the joke fails: on reading the article, no one will know why they're there or what on earth they mean. The caption "Guy about to be hit by really big China plane running very very fast on lightspeed" is incredibly incoherent. It's actually kind of funny for its incoherence, but I'm not sure that's what this article is aiming for. Also, of course, the picture is clearly of an air traffic controller who is not, in fact, about to be hit by the plane - which makes it seem like there's a joke being made wherein the picture doesn't fit the joke. The caption "The entire country of Taiwan riots for freedom" could be seen as sort of funny, in that it implies that the entire country of Taiwan is composed of about twelve people in pink shirts, but again, without reading the source, it just seems absolutely random. And, honestly, even after reading the source, it seems pretty random.
Miscellaneous:	3	Averaged
Final Score:	15	Honestly, I don't think I'd take this one any further. I think fixing this might be too much work for too little payoff. And I can see that you already have a whole lot of other projects here that you're working on; it might be a good idea to focus on those, instead. Good luck!
Reviewer:	pillow talk 23:15, 10 July 2008 (UTC)