Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Jimmy Ar'son

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edit Jimmy Ar'son

Ramien 22:49, December 17, 2010 (UTC)

I'm all over this like a nun on a chocolate cake. --Black Flamingo 19:13, January 7, 2011 (UTC) Fuck it, Mr Bole got there first. --Black Flamingo 19:14, January 7, 2011 (UTC)


Hyperbole is engaged in the dual processes
of giving you his opinion and pretending you care.
Humour: 1 Hey, Ramien! So, I see that this is that only article you've ever written, and you haven't been here in three weeks since you requested this Pee Review. This makes me skeptical that you're even going to read this. So, if you are, welcome to Uncyclopedia! And, if not, well, I'm completely wasting my time!!
  • Lede: Let's start at the beginning. The concept seems to be that someone named "Jimmy Ar'son" has been President of the United States for 50 years, and is an arsonist. Well, right off the bat, we know that the idea that we've had the same President for 50 years is patent nonsense. So, I'm thinking: is this going to be some political satire? The concept isn't actually entirely clear to me at this point, other than that this is going to be an article about someone who 1) is the President; and 2) is an arsonist.
  • Family History: This is completely unfunny. I don't even see an attempted joke in here. Why do you want me to know this stuff? Is it going to be important later on that Ar'son's ancestors are Dutch? It the old rule, here - if you introduce a gun into the first act of a play, it has to be used in the third act. Otherwise, you're boring your audience with extraneous, pointless details.
  • Early Life: Okay, so Ar'son was born in 1906, which makes him... 104. Well, that's implausible, but not impossible, I guess. Again, I just don't see any jokes in this section. Honestly, I'm getting very bored reading a fictional history of a person who doesn't exist, and therefore, who I can't possibly care about. I'm a little bewildered that his parents were "formerly proud, now slightly crispy" - which I assumed was a set-up for Ar'son burning them to death - and then suddenly I find out they were killed in a car wreck. What?? I guess the only joke I can find here is "Somerset Morgue for Dead People," which is clever, but certainly not enough to carry a whole section. Oh, and there's a dead body in the attic for some reason. That's... odd.
  • Old Age and Death: Wow, so he hasn't set anything on fire, and he hasn't become President, and we're already doing this. Well... okay. I find it a little amusing that you identify cigarettes as the cause of cancer and snake oil as the cure for cancer, but there's a lot of weird nonsense here that just looks like made up crap and isn't funny. You say he was elected President, although there's absolutely no discussion of his campaign, platform, etc. And we're told he invented fire, which is just bizarre, because.. come on. That's been around for a while. There's a weird joke about Snake Oil being named after Solid Snake, which... doesn't have enough connection to the real world to be funny. Jerry Springer's in here for some reason. I don't know, Ramien. This is a mess.
  • Post Mortem Presidential Actions: This just tells us, basically, that all future problems were successfully blamed on a guy who died in 1961. This is too implausible to be funny.
  • Jimmy's House of Arson Corporation: Okay, so if I remember right, this company was founded in 1951, and it made cigarettes and Motrin, right? But now you're telling us it makes fire, napalm, and C4. What the fuck just happened? Anyway, being told that a corporation makes military weapons... is not funny.
  • List of JHOA Products: In general, it's a bad idea to end an article with a long list. Lists get tedious and most of us don't like them. There's a very mild joke in FIRE about being able to solve all problems by burning your house down - okay. Not hilarious, but at least it's an attempt at humor. In NAPALM, you basically just tell us what napalm is, using an advertising tone of voice, which... doesn't make me laugh, either. C-FOUR and GREEK FIRE are more of the same - this is getting tedious fast. The INCENDIARY PILL is, I guess, something that sets your stomach on fire - the thing about couching something in euphemism is that we kind of have to know what it is, or we might just end up taking the euphemisms at their word. There's a thing in here about assassinating an independent researcher, too, for some reason. And then there's OPERATION FIRESTORM, which kills all life on the planet, basically. Well, okay! That was certainly a list - but one with extremely few jokes.
  • Product Usage: I'll be honest with you. It was hard to even read this far, and I'm probably the only person who will ever read this section. There's a lot of stuff in here about Communism and killing Communists with fire-based weapons... dude, wasn't this originally an article about a President who was an arsonist? I mean, I can't even figure out the point of this article anymore.

Okay. This article has serious problems. Let's talk a little bit about comedy theory in the next section.

Concept: 1 Every article needs to have a concept. And 99% of the time, the best concept is "let's make fun of something by skewing reality just a little bit." Read some featured articles, and you'll see that, indeed, 99% of them follow this formula. A concept can usually be best expressed in one sentence, like "What if you applied the same over-the-top cinematics of The Bourne Identity to something very boring?" (See: The Bourne Pottery Class) or "What if we actually took the game mechanics of Dragon Warrior seriously?" (See: Dragon Worrier) or "What if Star Wars was retooled to be a Japanese Opera?" (See: Star Wars (Japanese Opera))

What you really can't get away with is a zany universe where all semblances of reality are off the table. In The Bourne Pottery Class, you simply can't get away with saying that suddenly Mama Luigi jumped through the window and repealed the Emancipation Proclamation. That's so far off-concept that it would simply ruin the article.

You could get away with a concept like "What if the President of the United States was an arsonist?" That would be a viable article. But you can't get away with completely rewriting the universe so the President has been dead for fifty years and never served while alive, and suddenly change concepts, mid-article, to "What if a corporation sold military-grade weapons to the public?" All you get then is an incoherent mess.

Also, in general, a good article keeps you smiling with every single sentence. Every single sentence needs to contain either a punchline or a setup for a punchline. A sentence like "The Ar'son family has its earliest known roots in the Netherlands, specifically in Amsterdam during 1421." - it has no punchline, and it sets us up for nothing. It just wastes your reader's time. Your reader will resent that and refuse to continue reading your article.

Prose and formatting: 7 The one thing I do like about this article is the prose. You can write in an encyclopedic style; your sentences are, generally, grammatically correct. They convey information in a direct and non-confusing fashion. This, basically, means that you have promise. The problem with this article is that you didn't think of anything funny before you started writing it. That can be corrected in future articles. The inability to write coherent English sentences can't. So, even though I have to say that your first article is a failure, you're not one of the new writers who leaves me thinking "Ugh, this guy needs to go away; he'll never be good." I think that, with some inspiration, you could be good.

The formatting is pretty terrible, mostly because the pictures are just tossed in at random. But that's nothing a little spit and polish couldn't fix.

Images: 2 The images really, really don't add anything to the article, and there are too many of them. It's basically just a bunch of random pictures you'd find if you did a Google image search for "Fire." Many of them don't even have captions. And that "Head Asplode" picture is... so, so overused. Most of us have come to hate it, and, in fact, we've even been able to identify good candidates for deletion by searching for articles that use that picture. The only exception is the picture of the baby in the suit - and it doesn't match up with the article. Why is Jimmy Ar'son wearing a suit at age 1? You can't throw an out-of-context zany picture into an article and expect people to laugh.
Miscellaneous: 1 One.
Final Score: 12 Okay, so, in its current state, this article is certain to face deletion. And I think you should let it be deleted - it doesn't have a strong enough concept to justify any more work on it. Think of it as your practice article.

But I'd like it if you'd write another. You might want to read our mini-guide to humor, HTBFANJS. And consider what I said in the "concept" section. You're a good writer. If you have something funny to write about, I have no doubt you'll succeed. Good luck!!

Reviewer: Tinymasaru.gifpillow talk 19:48, January 7, 2011 (UTC)
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