Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/rasta-nomad

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rasta-nomads

This article was reviewed long ago, but seeing how i the writer feel it has improved, I think it deserves another review.

69.234.23.76 06:32, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Humour:	2	You know, I looked - I really did - for anything in here that I could find funny, slightly amusing, or even just slightly clever. I found the "Rasta-Nomad Reproduction" section to be slightly clever, but not funny. Everything else was just really not good at all. Let me just run down some of the problems with this article. Honestly, I don't know if this article can be saved - but this should at least be a guide to things to avoid in the future. Everything goes in - This is the biggest problem with the humor. It looks like the process of this article was to brainstorm, toss every single idea at the wall, and hope some of it stuck. One of the most important steps in the process of article-writing is for an author to delete his own unfunny ideas. If you have a twenty-paragraph article, and paragraph 12 is hilarious, that is not a good article. It's a bad article. The next step would be to delete paragraphs 1-11 and 13-20 and take it from there. Randomness - Here are some things that do not belong in an article about Rastafarian Nomads: Sesame Street, Oscar the Grouch, Robot Hitler, Scooby-Doo, the Mystery Machine, relief funds, Bing Crosby, JFK, Oscar Wilde, resurrection, the author's experiences with Uncyclopedia. Here's the thing: often, the funniest articles are ones that take something fictional (or take something real, and make it fictional), and then set that fictional thing in the real world, which is in no way prepared to deal with it. When you take something fictional and set it in a fictional world, you ruin the joke. And when you take something fictional and set it in some weird alternate universe where every pop culture icon in history is real, then there just is no joke. You know how sketch comedy always has a "straight man" (or someone who's a "straight man" for the purpose of a sketch)? When you tell a zany joke, you need someone to find it unusual; otherwise, you've just got a bunch of weirdos bouncing off the walls. Well, in most Uncyclopedia articles, the universe is the straight man. Take away your "straight man" by creating a bizarre new universe with no rules, and the article just becomes chaos. Just weird, unfunny chaos. Repetition - Repetition can be very funny. In the right hands, a repeated line can become an entirely new joke. But this article doesn't repeat lines to tell new jokes; it repeats jokes. Okay, so Rasta-Nomads are very lazy because they smoke too much pot. I guess that's... well, it's not funny, but I can at least see that it wants to be. But repeat it a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth time, and it just becomes annoying. There needs to be a new joke! No article can get by on the strength of one joke. Uncyclopedia memes - NEVER mention an Uncyclopedia meme unless you have a damn good reason. Oscar Wilde has absolutely no place in this article. Factual inaccuracy - factual inaccuracy can be hilarious when it's done for a specific purpose. When it's done apparently accidentally, it can ruin a joke. Rastafari is a religious movement; if these "rasta nomads" have a religion centered around worshiping apparently random people, then they aren't Rastafarians. Similarly, a nomad is someone who is constantly moving in search of grazelands or hunting grounds. If these people lie around in Colombia and never move, they aren't nomads. So... if they're neither Rastas nor nomads, how are they "rasta nomads"? Inaccuracies are funnier if you at least acknowledge that they're there and perhaps try to explain them in some bizarre way (or, like in the MST3K theme song, tell the reader that he really needs to learn how to relax).
Concept:	2	Without a single exception that I can think of, every good article on Uncyclopedia is a satire of some real-world phenomenon. The absolute worst articles on Uncyclopedia have no connection whatsoever to real-world phenomena: stuff like "Barbara is a Barbie doll who was saved from Bowser by Link and later moved to Narnia." This article is only a little better than that example - it starts with something that doesn't exist, and then starts churning out Sesame Street references. It stays a little more grounded by tying everything thematically to pot, but then the pot joke stagnates out and doesn't go anywhere. So, ultimately, this article can't work because it doesn't satirize anything, there's nothing to satirize, and it doesn't have a beginning, a middle, or an end.
Prose and formatting:	3	There are some wretched errors in this article. It would take me as long to point them all out as to rewrite the article entirely. So let me just mention three of the worst offenders: There, their, and they're. Yeah, I know, this isn't English class, but this mistake ruins an article. "There" refers to a place. "Their" means that people own something. "They're" means "they are". Excessive whitespace - sometimes there's one carriage return between sections. Sometimes there are three. Why? This needs to be cleaned up. Spelling! You know, Mozilla Firefox has a built-in spell check feature, and it's free. It might be worthwhile to download it.
Images:	4	Scooby-doo, two pieces of paraphernalia, two dogs, and a Rastafarian. I don't really see a point to any of these pictures. Particularly, a cartoon dog just has no place in the article. An article this size probably shouldn't have more than three pictures, and, ideally, they should all be relevant (altered or original pictures are especially good), and they should all be captioned humorously. Don't just litter an article with the top four GIS hits for "rasta bong" or whatever.
Miscellaneous:	3	One last thing - on breaking the fourth wall: again, this can be funny if it's done correctly. There are articles out there that acknowledge that they are fictional articles in hilarious ways. But a very unfunny way to break the fourth wall is to add a section into the article that complains about a bad pee review the article received. If the article were written in-universe, that would shatter it; and the fact that the transition barely raises an eyebrow just really illustrates how un-grounded this article is to begin with.
Final Score:	14	I'm sorry, but there's just no way around it: this article either needs to be rewritten or ICU'ed.
Reviewer:	Hyperbole 21:32, 3 June 2008 (UTC)