Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/User:BobNewbie/UnTunes:Bad Burrito (Feat. Nicki Minaj)

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User:BobNewbie/UnTunes:Bad Burrito (Feat. Nicki Minaj)

For anyone who would like to help a poor little n00b with his first UnTune. Please tell me what you think about it and where it can improve. Thanks! -I have a talking zombie 17:49, March 13, 2011 (UTC)

Not to sound impatient, but I have this nice little strawberry flavored condom thats only been used once and don't know what to do with it, so...anybody who reviews this will get a nice little strawberry flavored condom. Great for making balloons. ---I have a talking zombie 17:20, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

I'll get it. --Black Flamingo 20:34, March 17, 2011 (UTC)

Lemme go fetch my condom. Great for making balloons. ---I have a talking zombie 20:41, March 17, 2011 (UTC)

Humour:	4	Hey Bob, I've seen you around but never really spoke to you; so hi, how are you enjoying the site? Anyway, let's take a look at the article. There are two major problems in my opinion, the first being that the humour is just way too random. Virtually every line just leaps from one bizarre idea to the next, often even contradicting itself, and rarely getting to grips with the subject matter (or anything, for that matter). The problem is that there's no anchor here, no consistent angle to the humour. It seems you've basically thrown every little joke you could possibly think of in there with little regard for how it actually reads, and I wouldn't guess you spent very long doing this either. In the beginning of the article alone, you suggest that there is a genuine chat show called "Good Morning Nazi" and that Lady GaGa pressed charges against a burrito. Then, before the reader can even say "what the hell?" - you move on to a joke about Lady GaGa dangling a burrito over the balcony, à la Michael Jackson. By the end of the paragraph I was simply left bemused, and not in a good way. I suppose what you're essentially doing here is listing a bunch of random things that happened to the songwriters which all somehow involve Mexican food (even if only tenuously). There may not be any bullet points, but ultimately that's what it is; a list. You don't spend any time explaining your jokes, or giving any real information about the subject. Instead, it skirts over the humour in a way that just looks rushed and noncommittal. I seriously recommend you spend some time reading How to be funny and not just stupid. It has all sorts of hints on how to write in a way that is engaging and funny, mostly advising that you write satire instead of nonsense. I've got nothing against nonsense per se, in fact, one of my greatest achievements is utter nonsense. However, it still follows a logical pattern (basically just replacing facts with absurdities in an otherwise encyclopaedic style). But most of the time, satire is the better approach. Ordinarily I would talk about things you could satirise here, but to be honest the concept offers very little in the way of this. I guess you could poke fun at the music industry? Or Mexican food? Perhaps you could have some dumb music executive thinking that Salsa music actually had to be about Salsa? Not a great joke I know, but it's edging towards the kind of thing you should be writing, and at least it provides some explanation for what's going on here. It's up to you obviously, but I hope you can see what I mean. Perhaps you should take some time to read our featured articles too, for a better idea of how to write satire, and to see what generally passes for humour on this site. Another issue that kind of falls under the umbrella of randomness, is the sheer amount of clichés you rely upon for humour. I'm talking about all the references to Kanye West, kitten huffing, Bin Laden and grues ad nauseum. Not only is this random, but also really predictable - a bit of an oxymoron there but somehow also true. While I wouldn't chastise anyone for laughing at the kitten huffing article, or the whole Kanye West speech-interrupting thing, I really wouldn't recommend putting references into such things into your articles, especially if you're not going to give it an original spin. These jokes are just uber-bland, and not effective in written humour. I don't want to get into a rant about "what Uncyclopedia should be about", but one of the things I think we try to achieve here is a clever, timeless style of comedy, free from the usual insipid, cursory memes that make up most internet humour. Another reason you shouldn't rely on clichés for your jokes is that it just makes it look like you can't think of your own, and your article will never stand independently. No one wants to read something that just borrows from other works, if I wanted to read jokes about Osama Bin Laden, I would read the articles on him, not an article which is supposed to be about... whatever this is supposed to be about. Another note, when I say clichés; take that to mean other popular articles too. Simply mentioning Bob the Sperm isn't funny, for instance, regardless of how funny the article in question is. Ok, so to look at some different sections a bit more closely - I notice that at times the writing becomes redundant, specifically in the Success and Swahili Remake part. You just repeat a large paragraph from the beginning, and it wasn't particularly funny to begin with. It feels like little more than padding, as does the Appearances in other media section, which just a list, and a short one at that. Again it's just way too rushed and barely even makes sense. Generally you just need to spend some more time on this, expand on what you have, trim what you don't think works and try to steer the article into some consistent direction - because right now it doesn't seem to have any kind of aim.
Concept:	3	The other major problem as far as I'm concerned is with the concept. The thing that sticks out the most in terms of this is probably the fact that the article, despite passing itself off as an UnTune, has no musical qualities to it at all, by which I mean there's no song to listen to. Instead, it's sort of a cross between a mainspace article about a made-up song and a bunch of lyrics (much like this lovely article). This renders the whole article a bit pointless, and it simply shouldn't be in the UnTunes space whilst lacking this. Are you going to record one? The point of an UnTune that involves real life people, surely, is to satirise those people. This doesn't do that, it just presents us with a silly, non-existent song, but who cares about that? It would be nice to see an actual song file in there, one that makes fun of the two artists you have here; their styles and conventions - whatever they are (not my area of expertise, since I don't really follow music like this). If you're not going to record a song, then I don't think there's a whole lot you can do with this. No one wants to read a massive, repetitive lyrical section about burritos. It's hard to follow when you can't hear a tune, it's not poetic enough to make sense without music, and finally it's way too random and silly to really work in any way. About the only thing that could save this is some pre-recorded backing track that somehow satirises popular music, because the burrito thing just isn't funny. As I've already said, the article really needs some direction. Too many UnTunes are just made-up songs and too many articles are just about made-up things. The problem is, this doesn't really satirise anything. I appreciate that it's hard to write a comedy song, but I really don't see how you've arrived at this idea. Why on Earth would Lady GaGa and this "Nicki Minaj" (if that is her real name) write a song about a burrito anyway? You say they're drunk, ok, I suppose that could work... but lyrically the song doesn't even explore what's actually funny about burritos (which may well be nothing at all, but that's not an excuse here - you decided on this idea, there must have been some reason you did). Essentially, you have no concept at all. It looks like you just thought, I'll write some lyrics about burritos and then see what happens, without really planning ahead. Perhaps a little rewrite of the lyrics would help too? Something to tie it all together and inject some sense. Something clever - something that goes beyond just talking about food, and ventures into satire.
Prose and formatting:	5.5	Overall it all looks a bit scruffy. The big lyric section doesn't help this, and the lines seem unnaturally spaced out. There's a hell of a lot of ugly white space throughout that whole section. The prose looks rough too, mainly due to the large amount of things like italics, capital letters and inconsistent grammar. Definitely run this through a spellchecking device of some kind, or simply proofread it. There's also a hell of a lot of things like speech marks and parentheses which add to the messiness. None of this is a major issue, but you may want to think of a way around them if possible, especially things like the made-up awards you list, which are capitalised and italicised.
Images:	2	You only have two and neither is particularly effective. The first one of the album cover is very poorly done. It doesn't look convincing as an album cover, least of all one by a hip, sexy pair of singers like these two no doubt are. You should definitely re-do this if you want an actual album cover in the article, or perhaps get the guys at image request to do it for you. The second one could be anything really, it doesn't seem especially vital to the piece as a whole. The weird thing about it is that it doesn't move in the article, which may be because you made it a thumbnail, I'm not too sure, but if you remove the thumb tag that seems to set it off again. In any case, the picture isn't really that funny either. You definitely need more images overall, and it seems strange that there are none of Lady GaGa or Nicki Minaj. Generally UnTunes don't need to many images, but this is such a huge one that it makes it look really plain. Take a look at this image-less UnTune as a comparison in visual brevity.
Miscellaneous:	3.5	Overall feel.
Final Score:	18	Ok, so I would say this does have a long way to go before being finished. I would really like to see you do an actual UnTune as I think it would help dramatically, and would also justify the namespace. In terms of the prose sections, it would also be nice to see you try to rework some of the prose sections, just so it's less random and has more of a direction. Now I know at times the review might sound harsh, but at the end of the day this is all just my opinion. Disregard it if you want. Whatever you choose to do with this, I strongly recommend you spend a lot more time on it. It's not that you're a bad writer, you've just landed a difficult concept, and haven't spent much time thinking about it. If there's anything I've said here that you want me to explain better, or if you want my opinion on anything I might have missed, please let me know on my talk page and I'll try to help. I hope the review is ok.
Reviewer:	--Black Flamingo 23:26, March 17, 2011 (UTC)