Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/UnNews:USAF is Firin' Thah Lazor
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UnNews:USAF is Firin' Thah Lazor[edit source]
To meme-ish? I'd like some opinions on this... -- 17:32 EST 18 Feb, 2010
- I'll have this one done either tonight or tomorrow. --ChiefjusticeDS 15:45, February 19, 2010 (UTC)
| Humour: | 6 | OK, there is some good humour in this one and it definitely demonstrates the potential to be excellent, but there are some problems that I would recommend you take a look at. The very first thing that struck me was that while you have a reasonable grasp of the humour for an UnNews my feeling is that you are not quite there yet. The important thing to remember is that you should try to sound exactly like a journalist would sound and a big part of the humour comes from what you are presenting. The temptation linked to this is to veer off into trying to present too much unbelievable material to a reader very quickly, for instance were I authoring an UnNews about President Obama's recent meeting with the Dalai Lama and I said "President Obama and the Dalai Lama discussed the developmental schedule of the doomsday device that is said to be being constructed in Tibet behind the front of a small monastery" it is presenting something completely untrue as a news article but the fundamentals of the idea are obviously not true and this hurts it; what this means is that the passage above distorts the characters at the meeting too, rather than simply placing them in a humorous situation. This is what you need to look at, you have placed the US military in the situation of having laser weapons, and you do this well enough, yet you bring the idea in at the end of them being sued by a character from Star Wars, this makes the entire article feel slightly unbelievable. I think the idea of the US military whooping their way through the test of a new weapon with typical bravado and patriotism is a good idea, but you distort the entire seting of the article by including a clearly fictional part at the end, this makes it much harder for a reader to buy into your joke. My feeling is that in response to this, rather than simply deleting this you work it into your article, such is the joy of UnNews, you can do what newspapers are best known for doing, speculating. Speculation offers you a whole new range of jokes, for instance the narrative could speculate that this is just the beginning of some kind of transformation of the USA, into the galactic empire. Something like "The US secretary of defence, Robert Michael Gates, was optimistic as to the potential of this new capability, speaking at a press conference he said 'With this new weapon the sky is literally the limit! Firin' a Lazor can solve virtually any problem!'. Is this the beginning of a revolution in the field of weapons technology? Only time will tell, but perhaps, in years to come, that may not be a moon you see in the sky at night, but a space station." Now while that does drag on a bit I hope it helps get my point across, it is easy enough to work your article around so that you can still incorporate the same themes.
Now that I have finished complaining about that I'll move on, the rest of your humour is pretty good, but I do find myself wanting you to include a couple more jokes beyond the basics. As you have said above, the inclusion of a meme naturally brings you to the problem that memes are highly overused, so you need to make jokes beyond the whole "Firin' mah Lazor" idea. This does link to the above to an extent, the scope provided by a regular news article means that you can do this without adding or taking away from your story. I'll speak a bit more about this below, when I talk about the composition of your article. |
| Concept: | 6 | The idea is pretty solid and amusing enough. The problem that is holding you back here is your tone. As I have mentioned at great length above you need to sound like a real journalist, this is rooted in your tone and effects the overall outcome of your humour. Despite the meme try to keep the reporter professional. The very best thing you can do is to keep a real news article next to you while you write, preferably one that is on a similar topic as yours, i.e. regarding the USAF. Take careful note of the way that the reporter presents the story, it is also worth checking out some of the featured UnNews articles. The idea of sounding exactly like journalist is to increase the impact of the jokes when you make them. Try to avoid saying things like "That's right, the Americans have lasers now!" it sounds unprofessional and undermines the narrative's credibility in the rest of the article. Just some minor tweaks to this should see the article improve very quickly. |
| Prose and formatting: | 8 | A pretty high standard here, not very much to be said. Keep a careful eye on your spelling and grammar, it is even more important in an UnNews. You are doing pretty well with this so far so I won't focus too much upon it, just make sure you are proofreading carefully. You may want to consider making the image a bit smaller as it is very big right now and really dominates the page above the text, making it a bit smaller not only provides scope for including a second image should you wish to illustrate any expansion to the article but also means that it seems more like an addition to the text rather than the other way round. |
| Images: | 7 | The image isn't bad and got a smile from me. There isn't much to be said here except to mention just as a minor problem the edges of the explosion in the image look a bit scruffy, you might want to look at either tidying this up yourself, or getting one of our trained photo-shop wizards to take a look for you. I also thought that while the caption does increase the feel that this is a news article, it doesn't provide much in the way of humour and you may wish to take a second look, but this is completely up to you. |
| Miscellaneous: | 7 | My overall grade of the article. |
| Final Score: | 34 | Some good and bad parts to this one, what you do well is done very well, and what you do less well has the definite potential to be great. Just some minor fixes to be made here and there and a second look at some aspects of your humour. I know I don't touch on the positives much up there, but they are there and I would encourage you to be careful when editing so that you don't damage what you have already done well, use your judgement and make careful edits and this is unlikely to be an issue. If you have any questions or comments for me feel free to leave them on my talk page. Good luck making any changes. |
| Reviewer: | --ChiefjusticeDS 15:26, February 20, 2010 (UTC) | |