Audit complete and written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_02.comedy_doctor.md`.

**Verdict: CLEAR, with three blocking findings.** The chapter's comedy is overwhelmingly character-sourced and correctly calibrated to a reflective Theo logistics chapter — 46 low-amplitude items, 45 scoring funniness-2, with the densest comedy placed exactly where the chapter card flagged risk (the three-week gap montage, including the Gary/linen beat and the proofs cycle). The noun-strike running gag is at its sanctioned showcase density here and varies every instance, peaking with the deletion-without-replacement on the assignment card; I logged it as **at saturation from chapter 03 onward**.

The three blocking findings:

1. **L23 — "and there was no question mark anywhere in it"** (funniness 1, rented device): the dialogue's own punctuation already performs the joke; the gloss explains it. Order: cut the gloss, keep the reread-load-bearing decode that follows.
2. **L63 — "She read the way other people argued"** (portable, narrator-overlay, workshopped): a freestanding aphorism in nobody's idiom that the scene proves anyway within four lines. Order: clean cut preferred; condition-report material if a replacement is wanted.
3. **L111 — "in the voice of someone filing rather than dropping it"** (workshopped by duplication): near-verbatim repeat of chapter 01's approved "in the tone of a woman filing a document" — same frame, same filing figure, which exposes the template and spends June's filing metaphor before Turn 3 needs it. Order: replace with an observable action ("did not ask the next question"), explicitly steering away from the straightening gesture, which is under cap-watch.

Other findings worth knowing: distribution checks all pass — not oversweetened (the "Enrolled" dodge and the exit barb "You're better at the rest than you should be" keep their teeth), no cringe, and the decode-the-behavior mechanism family is the one named concentration (8 of 46), which the two cuts above thin to an acceptable six. I also opened a new tracker watch row for **Theo's Odile-exegesis epigrams** ("She doesn't alphabetize people" / "She changes them until she stops") — two per chapter is the ceiling before he starts poaching Odile's exclusive quotability license. Strongest item: Odile's "He will email you directions to a building you are standing in. Ignore the second paragraph," which pays off the deleted-paragraph setup from L49 while doubling as a reread clue.
