Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/UnNews:Young girl arrested for hoodwinking the world
UnNews:Young girl arrested for hoodwinking the world[edit source]
I'll be completely honest with you here. I just want a review so I can nominate this. If you can point out any big flaws, maybe I'll change something, though I don't think there are any big flaws in it. If you're really lazy, you can just nominate it and be done with it, though I would like some feedback. 18:44, 18 January 2011
PEE REVIEW IN PROGRESS of giving you his opinion and pretending you care. |
GOD FUCKING DAMN IT MY FUCKING REVIEW GOT ERASED I'LL DO THIS WHEN I'M LESS ANGRY
15:37, February 10, 2011 (UTC)- :( What browser do you use? I use Firefox and it usually prevents my edits from getting erased before I've saved 'em.
- Yes, I use IE. The problem, really, is that the left thumb button my mouse is so fucking sensitive - brush it gently and you've hit "back."
- But with Firefox I can go back and forward and everything I've typed will still be there. Hell, I can even turn off my computer and when I open Firefox again, the text will still be there. Something that bothers me about IE is that it continually refreshes pages, even if I'd just visited that page. It unnecessarily consumes a lot of memory and time. Actually, that's probably the reason why your edits get lost when you hit "back". 17:22, 10 February 2011
16:41, February 10, 2011 (UTC)
15:45, 10 February 2011
- Yes, I use IE. The problem, really, is that the left thumb button my mouse is so fucking sensitive - brush it gently and you've hit "back."
Humour: | 5 | Hey Socky! I'm still irritated about my first review getting swallowed up into the ether. It was long and better than this one. But, I'll do my best not to take it out on your article.
Okay, so, this is a short article by an established writer. This should be a slam-dunk for being in and out of Pee Review in a matter of days. And it should be a slam-dunk for being on and off VFH in a matter of a week or so, whether it passes or fails. But that hasn't happened. Instead, it's sat around for weeks and no one's really done anything with it. Why? Well, there are two reasons. One is a humor problem and one is a concept problem, so that is where I will put them. REASON 1: IT IS NOT THAT EASY TO GET THE JOKE. I'm a pretty smart guy. I can do, like, math. And it took me a long time to get this. I navigate over to the page, and I see this is a story about a young woman who's arrested for hoodwinking (or "fooling, deceiving, defrauding") the world, and I see an iconic mugshot of Jane Fonda. So my first thought is that this is some kind of article about Jane Fonda. The first thing I see is that the girl is Canadian, and I think "Okay, well, that makes some sense, since Jane Fonda was arrested for that mugshot when she was flying from Canada to the U.S." But as I read on, I learn that the "hoodwinking" in question deals with bad music, so I start to get the first inkling that this isn't about Fonda at all. It's about some musician. Ke$ha? Katy Perry? I eagerly mouse over the "black person," hoping for a clue, but all I see is Nigga. I exclude Lady Gaga when I see a link to her. It isn't until I actually get to the *external link* at the *very very bottom* - and then read that link carefully, because even it keeps things ambiguous at first glance - that I realize you're talking about Justin Bieber. By now, I think a lot of editors have given up. They've looked at an article that appears to be about Fonda, read three paragraphs, become confused, said "Whatever," and went off to look at something else. |
Concept: | 4 | REASON 2: ONCE YOU DO GET THE JOKE IT'S KIND OF CHEAP.
What the joke actually boils down to is:
Well, I've spent literally a year now listening to people laugh about - or get inexplicably furious about - Justin Bieber's somewhat feminine appearance. I get it, guys. He's not the most masculine guy in the world. The fact that people are whipped into such a hysterical frenzy by the fact that Justin Bieber doesn't closely resemble David Boreanaz is what inspired me to write UnNews:Grown man hates Justin Bieber. I think there's a lot more to say about Bieber-haters than Bieber himself. Shit, I'm not the most masculine guy in the world, myself. Having now consumed approximately five hundred times my body weight in beer, I have what some might describe as "man titties." Interestingly, though, no one feels the need to publicly mock my man-titties all over the Internet, suggesting that Bieber's feminine appearance threatens them in some unique and specific way. As for his music itself - well, it isn't really "his" music, is it, now? He has exactly the same career as hundreds of pop artists before him: some team of industry pros writes him a song and he sings it. He's got exactly the same job as Katy Perry or Jordin Sparks, or N*Sync before them, or Natalie Imbruglia before them... and, yeah, for about three decades running, people have been acting like it's a fantastic revelation that their popular music wasn't actually very good - but it's never been a revelation at all. Even (probably especially) the industry pros writing it know it's crap, but they have mortgages, you know? And they know that people will buy songs that sound a certain way, and they're right. So, that's getting a little heady, but the point is, I find it hard to laugh at "Justin Bieber looks like a girl and he sucks." Do others? Maybe. I don't know, they're not writing this review, so fuck 'em. |
Prose and formatting: | 8 | There's nothing much wrong with the prose and formatting, although I had concerns about the shift out of the journalistic tone, what with describing Perez Hilton as a faggot or having the Atlanta chief of police overreact in a bizarre way. Sort of takes you out of it, you know? "Taking you out of it" can be funny - but it can also make the article fall flat. Here, it's... risky. |
Images: | 6 | The image is, in retrospect, kind of the whole point of the article, isn't it? But I just stared at it, wondering if it was giving me hints about the concept, or was a random insertion - in general, wondering why the fuck I was looking at Jane Fonda's mugshut. In the end, I think it misled me to a greater extent than it helped me get the article, and by the time I got it, I was no longer able to laugh. |
Miscellaneous: | 7 | Let's make this an even 30. |
Final Score: | 30 | "How to improve this" is a tricky question, because if you make it more obvious, well, it kills what you were trying to do. The subtlety is what makes this stand out from other Bieber articles, but the subtlety is also (in my opinion) the reason that this has been met with such a lukewarm reception: people just aren't getting it.
Honestly, I think you just need to go write an article with a better concept than "Justin Bieber looks like a girl." You've done it many times before, and, hell, I'm sure you'll do it again. But there's not a lot of advice I can really give you here. You had an idea, you executed it correctly, you thought it was funny, the community gave you a lukewarm response. If you'd executed it sloppily, I could help, but I think you wrote exactly the words you wanted to be there. Believe me, I've had that experience before. I guess all you can do is move on to something else... |
Reviewer: | 16:26, February 10, 2011 (UTC) |
- Oh, well. When I first looked at the picture, I thought "Holy shit, she looks just like Justin Bieber." and I just had to write an UnNews about it, ya know. To be honest, I don't really care about Justin Bieber in any particular way. In my opinion, he does kinda look like a girl, but I don't consider that to be hugely funny. But when I saw that Jane Fonda picture I thought it'd give a nice edge to the Justin-Bieber-looks-like-a-girl joke. I think it might've been a nice feature at the start of the whole Bieber fever thingy, but now the the joke's so old even Bieber himself parodied it. 17:22, 10 February 2011