Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/User:TheLedBalloon/Pae Do

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User:TheLedBalloon/Pae_Do

This page was a stubby list, or perhaps a listy stub, and I gave it a home. I've been thinking maybe it's ready to be released back into mainspace....? P.M., WotM, & GUN, Sir Led Balloon (Tick Tock) (Contribs) 02:30, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Humour:	7	Some of the humor seemed, to me, to be predictable See endnotes.
Concept:	8	Good concept -- a non-obvious pun put together with the perennially fashionable topic of oriental martial arts.
Prose and formatting:	8	Well-written. My compliments on the prose.
Images:	7	Appropriate image.
Miscellaneous:	7	On the miscellaneous part, somehow this piece doesn't grab my imagination strongly.
Final Score:	37
Reviewer:	----OEJ 18:22, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Endnotes: On humor: Perhaps especially in this piece it is difficult to avoid the predictable. The topics -- pedophilia and martial arts -- have such widely known characteristics that it's damned hard to get away from taking a line of development that the reader immediately recognizes, and which he can probably predict. Ritualized combat, sodomy, codes of conduct, oral sex -- doggone it, these are almost cliché elements of martial arts and/or pedophilia.

Well, in the literary world I suppose everyone starting out to write a novel which involves a murder is faced with the same general kind of problem: how, in the Post-Agatha-Christie world, can one avoid the well-trampled lines of development familiar to the unwashed hordes of readers even passingly familiar with the genre?

How does a writtar take a situation or premise which involves strongly stereotyped subjects and treat it in an original, surprising, and yet authentic way -- and thereby make the piece interesting and engaging to the reader despite the well-trodden nature of the subject?

Um, I dunno. I can make some guesses, and that's about it.

Guess #1: Develop a fictionally powerful and well-imagined metaphorical example. For example, carnival freaks and religious cults are subjects at least as well-stereotyped as pedophilia and martial arts. Tom Waits' song "Eyeball Kid" would make a good Uncyclopedia article parodying those subjects. Waits doesn't present any abstract ideas about freaks or cults; instead, he tells the story of the Eyeball Kid including his birth in 1949 to parents Zenora Bariella and Coriander Pyle, the singer's meeting with him in the Saigon jail, and his development as a curiosity and, ultimately, a freak-cult leader ("We're all lost in the wilderness, we're blind as can be, he come down to teach us how to really see."). The technique is to parody the subjects to hand by conjuring up real things -- specific people, places, things that "really" happened -- and then drawing these specific images together in a conceptual framework so that at the end the reader goes "Aha! Eyeball kid -- he's talking about celebrity freaks and the selling of pseudo-religious cults! He's talking about....TOM CRUISE AND SCIENTOLOGY!"

Or whatever connections the reader cares to make. (Our job, I begin to think, is not to create a perfect replica of our own ideas in the reader's minds. We'll be doing just fine if the writing provokes interesting ideas of any sort in the reader's mind.)

Guess #2: Crossing the line. I think some writers are able to take a stereotyped or cliché subject and shove it outside the limits of reasonableness and commonplace reality. Jeff Foxworthy's "You Might Be a Redneck If" jokes play off the clichés about rednecks, but an article could take it further and mock the clichés themselves. I suspect it works best if the reader is in on the game -- if the writer makes it clear that he knows the clichés and is intentionally taking them over the edge. You might be a redneck if your sister is your mother-in-law...and she is also not only a snapping turtle but an albino snapping turtle with a cleft palate who plays the banjo. (That's not a very good example.)

To be specific, in the case of Pae Do one might avoid pushing the sex-act descriptions outside the commonplace in an explicit way ("anally penetrated clear up to the liver" is an ugly image that is not going to make people laugh) but instead push comical or ludicrous images ("...so ritualistically elaborate are these movements that the pae-do practitioner often fails to notice that the child he is addressing has not only left the area but before leaving managed to steal the pae-do practioner's wallet, wristwatch, shoes, and toupee.")

(Addendum: I am reminded of something another Uncyclopedian wrote: Mock the bully, not the victim. It's easier to laugh when the bully, the pedophile, is the butt of the joke.)

Again, whatever. This just about wraps up my ability to comment for the time being. I recommend finding specific people and images to fit the piece, and comically pushing beyond the boundaries of what everyone knows about Tae-Kwon-Do and pedophilia.

Good luck! ----OEJ 18:22, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

As always, I greatly appreciate the review. Especially #2 let a few ideas pop into my head.(No sexual comment needed.) I'm gonna try to incorporate some stuff, I hope you'll check it out in the future. In the mean time, you could always look at what this page looked like before I got my grimy mitts on it. Oh, and is it weird that I found "anally penetrated clear up to the liver" to be very funny? Guess that says a lot about me, huh. Later. P.M., WotM, & GUN, Sir Led Balloon (Tick Tock) (Contribs) 01:18, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

PS: My idea was "...subtlety was not particularly important to the routines. Due to this, as well as general stupidity, almost every practicing paedophile has been caught attempting to seduce a young police officer, and immediately arrested." Forgot it for a second there....X| P.M., WotM, & GUN, Sir Led Balloon (Tick Tock) (Contribs) 02:41, 12 June 2007 (UTC)