HowTo:Write A Funny Band Article
“Contrary to popular belief, I have not been a member of Slayer, Metallica, My Chemical Romance or DragonForce. Nor would it be funny if I was.”
“You are our only hope. About the 20,765th only hope we've ever had”
“You are our only hope. About the 20,766th only hope we've ever had”
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Our sincere apologies for luring you to this page with the prospect of teaching you how to write a funny band article. The title is, in fact, all lies. A funny band article is an oxymoron, an utter contradiction in and of itself, a sheer impossibility.
You are not convinced, of course. You've gone through the trouble of actually consulting a specialized article, not satisfied with the simple guidelines of HTBFANJS. You can tell from your grades that you have more intelligence and, dare you say it, more wit than your fifth-grade classmates. You actually care more about writing a humorous article than mindless praise or piss on the band of your (dis)like. And most of all, you will be the one to finally make a difference, like the little saviour you are. And just as it is your task to fulfill your destiny as the Hero of Band Articles, it is my task to crush your hopes, grind them to dust and cast them into the winds. Nothing personal.
Step 1: Picking A Band
Even at the first step, you are destined to fail. Picking a band is like choosing a path on a crossroad of dead ends, and promises as much quality as that last metaphor. I have been there, seen it all, know all the possible outcomes. I can predict so well it comes close to actual clairvoyance. Pick your destiny:
- 1: You have chosen a band you actually listen to and like. We will be treated to an article on the sheer awesomeness of the band in the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Except, in a masterful epiphany on the fusing of genres, you decide to combine the epic style format with the pinnacles of the science fiction. The cool that oozes from the drummer's laser eyes will only be outclassed by the spectacular cyborg composition of the lead guitar. Not that I have anything against your personal preference for science fiction tropes and hyperbolic language, but it dooms the article to the netherworld of delete and failure.
- 2: You have chosen a band you have seen on television/heard on radio, and generally do not appreciate. To stick with the road to failure metaphor, this can be seen as the shortcut. While Internet may be the ideal place to mask your negative opinion with ridicule and bile and send it forth to step on every single toe of the feet of those who dare call themselves fans, that kind of thing is best left to the busier corners of the Web. Not that I have anything personal against rabid rantings that integrate language and numerology into one, but the admin overlords that reign in the Uncyclopedic realm will soon strike down any article that lacks spelling, coherence and common wit in general.
- 3: You have chosen a band that you have a neutral and unbiased view of. While I celebrate and send flowers to anyone who has acquired this level of sophistication, you have only postponed your unfortunate demise for so long. For you will come to a fork in the road named notoriety. If your band fails to have it, you can speck the article with as much skill and craftsmanship as there is room for on earth, the small audience it will get is essentially a funeral gathering, with your prized work soon a rotting corpse left in one of the server's more remote corners. If your band has it, however, its fate is even more grave. All the effort and time put into it will soon become null and void as other, less intellectually blessed people who have made picked destinies 1 and 2 will come and turn your article will turn from wonder into waste. It is vandalized left, right and center until it is a mere shadow of its nanosecond glory moment. Not that you must hold a personal grudge against these poor, unenlightened heathens.
Step 2: Actual Content
Still determined to continue, eh? Pigheadedness and determination often go hand in hand, and since you nicely fulfill the pighead criteria, it was expected that you will stick with your pitiful crusade into this minefield. If you consider yourself a hero, surely it must be a tragic one, unable to get your anagnorisis (look it up) until it's too late. The more content you use to flesh out your article, the deeper it will sink into the marshes of juvenile crap. The trail is populated by hazards, pitfalls and monsters that you cannot hope to pass successfully. What good is it to be ignorant of them?
- The pitfall of questioned sexuality looks innocent, like a little dent in the road, but it is actually a cleverly disguised pothole filled with poisonous snakes. Any attempt at insinuating that a band member is "into his own sex" will send you plunging in headlong. Same for bestiality, gerontophilia, pedophilia, necrophilia, incest and sexual humour in general. While successfully tested on prepubescent boys, it is somewhat of a guilty pleasure among more mature Uncyclopedians, and the combination with band articles will like result in loss of subtlety and cleverness. However, the opposite side of the spectrum is even less of an option.
- The punji trap of bodily fluids probably has you grinning at first, until you fall into the spiked bamboo smeared with brown excrement. Any bodily fluids, be they brown, white, yellow, green, red, multiple tints of gray or black, will kill any joke slowly and painfully. Unfortunately, this also makes the fluids of your spring of inspiration run dry.
- The landmines of nonsense litter the road ahead, ready to strike anyone attempting to sidestep the pitfalls and punji traps. Famous Uncyclopedians who showed up for band gigs, concerts in impossible places, band members with part-time jobs as superheroes, it all fits in here. Using the cursed tools of Discography and Trivia sections, you shoehorn cringeworthy oneliners and tiresome puns of real album titles(don't forget to make its release date at least two millennia from now) in like it's the best thing since sliced bread. Confident that exaggeration is funny, you happily bounce from one to the other, until the smoke clears and you find your article to be a mess that looks like it was written by a hack on crack.
- The big bad beast of bore lurks at the end of your trail, ready to strike down any hero who has successfully avoided all the preceding obstacles. His weapon is the very article you crafted itself, because being so concentrated on not stepping into traps made you fall for the biggest one of all: your work lacks any spirit, while it may not be complete drivel, it is mediocre, which is a far more merciless fate, making it rot and decay without anyone spotting the corpse.
You may look at me with a glare filled with righteous zeal and defiance, but do not blame me, as it is not I who has made it this way. That responsibility would rest with the other "fans". Not that I have anything personal against connoisseurs of kiddy humour.
Step 3: Dealing With Other "Fans"
I can congratulate you on one thing, your endurance has thrown me in the defensive. You have gotten me so far as to play my ultimate trump card, carefully led in by a little backstory.
You see, it was not all bad from the start. Sure, some people couldn't help but create single sentence articles under the header of their least favourite band, but a few bans here and there quickly prevented the spoilsports from turning the genre sour. However, it soon turned into a syndrome of the community, with ten-year olds forming cybergangs, each taking over from the other if their friend's IP was blocked, and revert wars giving the admins sleepless nights. The ten-year olds eventually united, instead of turning on each other in rabid fanboyism, and plagued any article that fell into the category with waves of vandalism and penis jokes. The admins gathered together, and came up with the weapon that would end the war once and for all: CVP. It was the ancient scorched earth tactic: redirecting all band articles to a policy page deprived of anything to laugh at was sinning against the nature of Uncyclopedia, but it worked. It was an armistice. Minor skirmishes still occur between admins and offenders, but it is clear the war only left losers, not winners.
That is the truth. Those are the two kinds of "fans" we have to deal with. One destroys by creating, the other destroys for the benefit of creation.
Nothing personal, eh?
Oh, but it is personal. So very personal.
Step 4: Accepting Reality
Yes. You finally realize it. If you have read on for so long, it means you must agree with me. We bittered individuals are not alone, I tell you. We were all once like you. We were the ones who invented the fake discography jokes, before the cursed ten-year olds destroyed them by including the word 'fuck' in entire songlists. We were the ones who created a funny Trivium article before it was banished to CVP, never to be wrested again from the mitts of the admins. We are few in numbers, but that is just reality. Accept it. See how much the you at the beginning of the article has changed compared to the you of this moment. Change can happen.
One day, we shall unite. We shall become the third faction of fans, the ones who actually care. Until then, we shall have to cry ourselves to sleep, and put up with the fact that even an article about how to write funny band articles has to stray from its implied subject matter in order to even be remotely funny. A goodnight to us.
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