Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/The 9/11 Commission Report

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The 9/11 Commission Report

Since there's a shortage of stuff to review, let's go! This was quasi featured near the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Those who voted against were not happy. Anyway, go ahead, dig in it! Mattsnow  20:46, March 17, 2012 (UTC)

Humour:	8	Concept first. I'm left wing. Not that it'll come as a surprise to anyone, but a pseudo-political article will bring up political sentiment. I'm also not American. Declarations done.  The 11/9 incident (I use European dating system myself) is a huge emotive issue. The number of deaths in the destruction of the towers was astronomical, and the number of deaths justified by the destruction of those towers an astronomical figure as well.  This is definitely going to be emotive, then, whenever anyone writes a article about an issue like this. Does this suggest we shouldn't write articles with a left/right bias. Well, no, we're a parody site, and we have no NPOV restrictions. Anything that is significant and part of a greater community consciousness is, and should be, ripe grounds for parody.  Or to put it another way, we can criticise Obama and George W equally. Same as we can criticise Nixon and Kennedy. Hey, when the shuttle exploded and killed 7 astronauts we were making jokes before the wreckage hit the water.  Having said that, a direct parody on the victims would be poor taste. Parodying the "innocent" dead is fairly tactless. Parodying the response to the incident is fine, and parodying the conspiracy theories is fine as well.  The one issue I have with the concept, on these grounds, is the section talking about the actions of the passengers on the plane. That may be the most poor taste element in the article.  As for the rest - dark humour and poor taste humour are different things. Michael Moore uses dark humour in his movies. He steers away from poor taste. True, he's also politically motivated, but I'm focusing on the humour here. As for the bulk of the concept - I've made a few comments on Al's talkpage about this already, but I see a lot of parallels between the 11/9 issue and the death of Kennedy.  The initial report was rushed and then used as a political tool. Any observation that contradicted it was labelled as conspiracy nut. 15 years or so later a second report was filed, showing officially that there were major issues with the first report. 30 years later a movie was made bringing it all into the mainstream consciousness. 45 years later the majority of Americans believe that there was at least two gunmen involved in the death.  We're just past the 10 year mark from 11/9 now. As more information becomes uncovered and available, the more that the official story appears to have issues. Given that some of these issues are as big as the plot holes in Independence Day, it's up to us to drive the truck through them.
Concept:	7	So, now that I've said all that, into the humour. As it stands the article is funny, but not funny enough. One thing to be very careful of is using silly in the place of funny.  The reason why I say this is that a clever concept generally requires clever humour. Where this falls down is in places it becomes too silly. Using Michael Moore or Stephen Colbert as examples - they use silly very sparingly. Saturday night live uses silly almost exclusively. So when you read a section think along the lines of What would Colbert do?
Prose and formatting:	8	A little clean up and proof read might be in order. I didn't pick up any major issues, but I am lazy. I'd remove the TOC ( __NOTOC__ ) as that does damage the joke toward the end. Creating a false TOC in it's place is not too hard, if you want to go down that track.  There is something about the overall look relating to the format that bugs me. I can't quite put my finger on it yet. Maybe playing with the header/subheader somewhat would improve it.
Images:	7.5	Image 1 encapsulates a lot of your article. This may be too much too soon though, and work better toward the base of it.  Smoke cloud: it might be just me browsing via mobile phone, but given what it's highlighting the image may be too small WTC7: no problem.  You need another image. Maybe an image of the report cover without the grade at the start, and with it at the end?
Miscellaneous:	8	Major change: I've gone through this as it is at the moment. One thing I've noticed is that it has argument/counter argument style. Would it work better as an UnDebate?
Final Score:	38.5
Reviewer:	Sir CPT Dr PuppyOnTheRadio GUN UmP WotM NotM FP VFP VFH CM POTM UGM 09:55 20 Mar