The audit is complete and saved to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_23.comedy_doctor_round2.md`.

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# Chapter 23 Comedy Doctor — Round 2 — Finished Together / Labels

Read cold as the reading guide's target reader (§2: warm, precise, lightly comic; Emily Henry at ~60% banter with sincere answers permitted; O'Leary found-family warmth; *Days at the Morisaki Bookshop* / *Before the Coffee Gets Cold* quiet as the floor) — the reader who wants comedy generated by these specific people's damage, not narrator wit painted over the scene. Chapter-card constraints applied: late-book payoff, not a banter showcase; comedy must arise from Theo's over-competent restraint, Odile's brutal economy, Priya/Ben logistics under pressure, and June's exactness; no joke may soften the costly New York path, Priya/Ben's slower choice, or portrait consent; `outcome rules: no character names the two-panel metaphor aloud`. Line numbers cite `output/chapters/chapter_23.md`.

Spent-family greps run clean on current text: `the math` (spoken) 0, `just coffee` 0, `Noted` 0, `whole of` 0, `a lie with` 0, conduct-grade praise 0 (June's "Closer"/"That one" grade the label copy — an artifact — not Theo's conduct). The construction families that drove the round-1 MONOTONOUS verdict are all repaired: recognitional `the way [X]` similes 0 (only literal "a third of the way down" L7, "on the way out" L47 survive); deadpan `, which` captions 0 (three functional narrator `which` remain, judged below). The chapter that came back is no longer being witty *at* the scene from one nozzle; the surviving comedy is character-generated and lands in register.

## ROUND-1 REPAIR VERIFICATION

All seven ordered repairs are present in the current text and hold.

1. **Narrator-overlay `the way [X]` recognitional similes — CUT (7 → 0).** Every round-1 instance is gone: L17 "read a badly hung frame" → "found the fault in it"; L27 "the way she took rooms in" → "took the room in once"; L63 "the way you'd claim a coat at a party" → "not sharp about it"; L93 "the way people come early…" → "early because the place they came from wasn't working"; L95 "the specific way of a man carrying a spreadsheet" → Ben-action (see #5); L113 "the way she did everything, in threes" → "in rows of three"; L167 "the way she took everything home" → "taking the dirty water home with the rest". Grep for `the way` returns only two literal/spatial uses (L7, L47). **Verified.**

2. **Deadpan `, which` caption clusters — CUT BACK (5 comic captions → 0).** Round-1 captions all removed: L3 "counted twice by half three, which was the tell, because…" → split into two plain sentences; L23 "which from her was a yes" → action (see #6); L27 "which was her way of remarking on it" → "He watched her clock the second jar… and leave it alone"; L49 "which meant she'd been tracking him… the side of the eye that did her real looking" → ends at "she hadn't glanced at him once"; L99 "which was a thing he was learning to do with his mouth shut" → "Theo waited, mouth shut." Three narrator `which` clauses survive; **none functions as a comic caption** (L27, L121, L169 judged in DISTRIBUTION). **Verified.**

3. **Twin "a lie with [X]" — REMOVED from narrator and Ben.** L39 "a lie with better manners" → "not looking would have been another kind of dishonesty"; L101 "a spreadsheet with an empty column is just a lie with math on it" → "I couldn't fill the column in. The blank part just sat there." Grep `a lie with` = 0. **Verified.**

4. **Fiscal antithesis "cost her a second before it paid her one" — REPLACED by phone action.** L79 now: "She read it. Her thumb stopped at the edge of the phone. After a second it moved." The debt-figure narration is gone. **Verified.**

5. **Ben's spreadsheet line — DE-POLISHED.** L95 caption "the specific way of a man carrying a spreadsheet around behind his eyes" → Ben-action "He kept waking his phone with his thumb and putting it back to sleep." L101 lands on "I couldn't fill the column in. The blank part just sat there" — Ben no longer out-aphorizes Odile's reserved register. **Verified.**

6. **June's "Labels walk off" deflection — REPLACED with plain backup logic.** L149 now: "Print a second one for the flat-file drawer. I want a backup." No deflection-joke lilt; June stays practical at the label's emotional peak without a punchline. **Verified.**

7. **Coat reuse in June's January line — REMOVED.** L81 "a coat I don't have yet" → "walking fast to stay warm." The FEB=coat charm (tracker: PAID) is not repeated; the only "coat" in the chapter is literal paint — "bury the block-in under a clean coat" (L65). The New York path stays costly. **Verified.**

No new portable, workshopped, or overlay comedy was introduced by any of the substitutions — each repair swapped narrator wit for character action or plain speech.

## INVENTORY

1 — "Nobody counts folding chairs twice for a room that seats eighteen unless he's counting them to keep from standing in the middle of the floor rehearsing four o'clock" (L3) — mechanism: deadpan self-diagnosis via displacement — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (folding chairs / seats eighteen / four o'clock = this room, June's arrival) — dramatic work: opens on his nerves and the withheld-usefulness engine in beat one — workshopped: no (strongest workshop-*candidate* in the narration: the "Nobody does X unless Y" shape looks composed; passes because it reports his actual over-counting and names the real displacement)

2 — "He had arranged a room around a woman who wasn't in it, out of her habits, for her comfort, without being asked… Carrying it back would be its own kind of arranging" (L3) — mechanism: self-catching + recursive deflation (undoing care is also care) — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: names the restraint problem before June arrives — workshopped: no

3 — "a mug in one hand she didn't offer to split and a manila folder in the other she did" (L11) — mechanism: withhold/offer antithesis — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (Odile-specific) — dramatic work: sets her terms on entrance (shares business, not warmth) — workshopped: no (reports a real two-handed gesture, not a composed spoken zinger)

4 — "You met your feelings and issued a form." (L19) — mechanism: insult-as-diagnosis / register collision (feeling → bureaucracy) — source: character (Odile, the sole style-bible-licensed high-density voice) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (names the clipboard he just built and his exact pathology) — dramatic work: diagnoses Theo's whole arc in seven words; targets the person/act, not his phrasing (clears §2 dialogue-diagnosis) — workshopped: no — **STRONGEST ITEM**

5 — "and it's blank, and it stays blank… I'm not moving it for a viewing or a crate or a person who needs walking somewhere" (L21) — mechanism: self-aware reduction (his old usefulness-role named as "a person who needs walking somewhere") — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (his assistant-trap; the chapter's boundary follow-through) — dramatic work: Theo's life-boundary follow-through, dry rather than sentimental — workshopped: no

6 — "she folded it into thirds and put it in the cardigan pocket, took the top chair off his stack, carried it to the flat files, and set it down where she meant to sit and watch" (L23) — mechanism: deadpan assent-by-appropriation (she accepts his boundary by commandeering his logistics) — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: renders her yes and the role-reversal (she now watches him work, on his chair) without a line — workshopped: no — *repaired: round-1 caption "which from her was a yes" cut; the action carries it*

7 — "twice she said 'Mine' before he'd decided whether to cross, not sharp about it… Twice he took his hand back to his own eight inches" (L63) — mechanism: repetition-with-variation (two claims + two takebacks) — source: character (June/Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (their seam, their collaboration) — dramatic work: keeps the territory-claim loving, not combative — workshopped: no — *repaired: round-1 simile "the way you'd claim a coat at a party" cut; lands on action*

8 — "January's a lot of lentils and walking fast to stay warm. But there's a key with a date on it now. That's a real thing to be broke toward." (L81) — mechanism: concrete specificity + reframe ("broke toward") — source: character (June's dry economy) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: keeps the New York path costly while dignifying the deadline — workshopped: no — *repaired: round-1 "a coat I don't have yet" cut; charm gone, path stays costly*

9 — "She sent me a photo of the studio-access form like it was a sonogram." (L89) — mechanism: incongruity simile (bureaucratic form = pregnancy announcement) — source: character (June painter-eye) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (anchored to Asha's form and June's not-going) — dramatic work: renders Asha's joy and June's un-bitter gladness; the path stays chosen, not lost — workshopped: no

10 — "Priya had two coffees, one of which she set down in front of June before she'd asked. She looked at what she'd done and said, 'Do you want that?'" (L93) — mechanism: self-catching care reflex (control, then correction) — source: character (Priya) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (her "care becomes control when she does not ask first" arc) — dramatic work: Priya's arc in a gesture; mirrors the chapter's ask-first/consent theme — workshopped: no

11 — "I made a spreadsheet with a column for whether we were ready, and I couldn't fill the column in. The blank part just sat there." (L101) — mechanism: deadpan understatement (the unfillable readiness-column) — source: character (Ben) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (his spreadsheet, his readiness) — dramatic work: names why the working number scared him; the empty column speaks — workshopped: no — *repaired: round-1 epigram "a lie with math on it" de-polished; Ben no longer out-aphorizes Odile*

12 — "I wanted the lease to make me not scared, and it turns out a lease can't do that. Who knew. Everyone. Everyone knew that." (L105) — mechanism: self-answer deflation — source: character (Ben) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (attached to the lease / eleven-minutes stakes) — dramatic work: self-deprecation that does NOT cancel "I'm scared it's the wrong call" — workshopped: no

13 — "the lender owning the loan on a form her nephew had made her that morning… She hung the clipboard back one degree straighter than he'd left it" (L115) — mechanism: reversal/payoff + precise over-correction as signature — source: character/situation (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (pays the L19 jab; the one-degree straighten is the book's Odile/Theo motif) — dramatic work: Odile submits to his system while keeping the last correction — workshopped: no

14 — "It's a wall text. It's explaining the joke before anyone tells it." (L131) — mechanism: meta-deflation (over-explanatory label = a joke pre-told) — source: character (June's editorial care move) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (guarded in-scene: "She wasn't grading him. She was doing to the card what she'd done to the doorway"; critiques the *work*, not his speech — clears §2) — dramatic work: enacts the no-caption thesis; June teaching Theo restraint — workshopped: no — **WEAKEST SURVIVING** (closest to portable; see verdict)

15 — "And 'views' is a tour bus." (L135) — mechanism: compression / incongruity (a word reduced to a tour-bus register) — source: character (June diction-precision) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (work-critique of the actual copy) — dramatic work: strips the label toward "finished together" — workshopped: no

16 — "Someone's going to tell you it's crooked and offer to fix it… tell them it's supposed to. Then come find me. I'll be at the coffee pretending I'm not watching the door." (L175) — mechanism: predicted-reflex setup + self-aware admission of wanting — source: character (June's wants-to-be-seen-and-not-caught contradiction) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the crooked corner is this piece; the wound is June's) — dramatic work: June choosing to be caught wanting = her arc's payoff; the crooked corner affirmed, not softened — workshopped: no

## EXCLUDED as non-comic (tension / thesis / craft / restraint, not attempted comedy)

Shown with evidence because the stance requires proving the passes, and because several are the successful de-workshops of round-1 items:

- "The form was ugly and useful and it existed because in November he had carried nine catalogs out of this building on no signature but his own good judgment" (L5) — rueful self-reckoning / Ch17-rupture callback; arc, not joke.
- "He looked at the water, the light, the tape, and cut the rest." (L31) — Theo restraint rendered as action.
- "foreshortened so hard the far end fell off a cliff" (L35) — strongest "is-this-narrator-wit?" *candidate* in description; excluded as craft — it renders the actual extreme foreshortening of June's threshold study, an optical fact of her composition, not painted-on wit.
- "not looking would have been another kind of dishonesty" (L39) — the de-workshopped replacement for round-1 "a lie with better manners"; now plain restraint/honesty.
- "Line them up and you get a third one neither of us saw." (L57) — aesthetic law in June's register; craft, and does not name the two-panel metaphor (respects the outcome rule).
- "He'd have handed it to her. He kept his grip on his own brush and let her reach." (L63) — withheld-care restraint, dramatic not comic.
- the pentimento passage / "He was doing it on purpose." (L65) — the underpainting craft-thesis.
- "it wasn't a confession, it was only drawing" (L73) — craft/thesis with a dry tint, not a beat.
- "four were doors he could hold — a framer… a crate he could drive to Ridgewood himself" (L83) — withheld-help inventory (restraint); controlled and varied per Theo's voice card, not catalog prose.
- "March is a long way to carry January." (L85) — tender; the dialogue-doctor's fake-sharp call, not a joke.
- "The helpful version costs me the room. I only just learned to tell them apart." (L87) — thesis kept deliberately sharp (protects the costly path).
- "I want to know what you want, not what the rent wants… That's my condition. Not the apartment. That." (L109) — sincere plain-speech thesis (protects the slower choice); "left it crooked" one line up is an arc-gesture (release), thematic not comic.
- "Two underpaintings of one room, finished together." (L143) — the emotional payoff artifact.
- "I want a backup." (L149) — the de-workshopped replacement for round-1 "Labels walk off"; now plain backup logic.
- "let them be two cards" (L151) — restraint payoff.
- the study-faced-in passage / "June would turn it tonight or she wouldn't." (L165) — portrait consent, pure restraint, carries no joke.
- "taking the dirty water home with the rest" (L167) — the de-workshopped replacement for round-1 "the way she took everything home"; now plain habit.

## DISTRIBUTION FINDINGS

**Density.** Right for a late-book payoff: 16 comic beats across a ~2,900-word chapter, subordinate to the joint-piece, label, tape, and cohort beats. The chapter card explicitly makes this a payoff, not a banter showcase; subordinate comedy is correct. No DRY / THIN problem — all four card-named sources deliver: Theo's over-competent restraint (1, 2, 5), Odile's brutal economy (3, 4, 6, 13), Priya/Ben logistics under pressure (10, 11, 12), June's exactness (8, 9, 14, 15, 16).

**Source split.** 16 of 16 comic items are character- or situation-sourced. **Narrator-overlay comedy = 0.** The round-1 overlay half (old L23, L27-paradox, L39, L49, L63-simile, L79, L95, L99, L113) was entirely converted to action or plain speech. This is the single largest change from round 1, where ~9 overlay items ran through one construction family.

**Mechanism variety.** Twelve-plus distinct mechanisms across 16 items (deadpan displacement, recursive deflation, withhold/offer antithesis, insult-as-diagnosis, assent-by-appropriation, repetition-with-variation, concrete-reframe, incongruity simile, self-catching care, understatement, self-answer deflation, reversal/over-correction, meta-deflation, compression, predicted-reflex). No mechanism recurs more than twice; the two Odile beats even use different mechanisms (antithesis L11, diagnosis L19, appropriation L23, reversal L115). The MONOTONOUS driver is gone.

**Sweetness — NOT OVERSWEETENED (three protected beats checked).**
- New York path stays costly: L81 "broke toward" + "lentils and walking fast to stay warm"; L87 "costs me the room"; L89 "still not go."
- Priya/Ben's slower choice stays sincere: L109 "That's my condition. Not the apartment. That." with the fear unretracted at L105 "I'm scared it's the wrong call." The round-1 concern (fear double-bracketed by two polished deprecations) is relieved: the L101 de-polish means the fear is now preceded by plain admission and followed by a single deflection (L105) that keeps the fear real.
- Portrait consent carries no joke at all (L165 rendered as pure restraint).

**Cringe.** None for this reader. **Warmth floor.** Holds — no comedy lands at a character's unrepaired expense; the close (L175) is warm.

**`, which` survivors (judged per the round-1 mandate).** Five round-1 comic captions cut to zero. Three functional narrator `which` remain, none a comic caption: L27 "which told him she'd decided the front entrance was a performance she wasn't giving today" (characterizing inference tied to June's exit-before-being-watched wound; the one survivor with a faint dry gloss — WATCH); L121 "which was the last real decision and so the one Theo wanted to over-build" (setup-transition + Theo self-characterization, ramp into the label comedy); L169 "which meant Priya had propped it, which meant the first of the cohort was on the stairs" (Theo's causal scene-logistics). Two dialogue `which` (L81, L147) are functional speech.

**Non-blocking WATCH notes for the tics tracker** (none rises to a comic-blocking finding; recorded so the family does not re-harden):
- *Calculation figure ×2:* "doing arithmetic" (L45) + "She did the arithmetic" (L81), both narration. Neither is spoken `the math` (Ch20 ceiling honored) nor debt-figure narration (Ch18/Ch19 retired family honored), but two "arithmetic" in one chapter is a soft echo adjacent to the retired family — hold to one or vary next chapter.
- *Residual `which`-gloss:* L27 "a performance she wasn't giving today" is the single surviving narrator `which` with a comic lean; judged functional characterization, non-portable — but it is the last drop from the repaired caption nozzle; seed no new ones.
- *Theo cold-open template:* L3 opens the Theo POV on solitary maintenance + self-audit, the shape the tracker marked "spent" at Ch10 ("next Theo chapter must open in company, mid-dialogue, or off-task"). The beat lands and is character-sourced (non-blocking), but it re-hits the flagged opening; acceptable as a late-book bookend of the Ch01 setup, noted for consistency.
- *Ben "checked twice":* L105 "Eleven minutes. I checked twice." echoes his Ch05/Ch11-retired double-check self-deprecation shape, but the self-mocking tag is dropped and the tic cracks into fear ("That's the real thing under the eleven minutes") — transformation, not repetition; do not restore the tag.
- *"left it" restraint cluster:* L3 (chair), L59/L71 (brush), L109 ("left it crooked"), L113 ("left it alone") — the chapter's deliberate leave-it-imperfect motif, all literal physical actions, not the retired refusal-to-conclude *narration* closure; keep them literal (they are).

## CHAPTER VERDICT: CLEAR

Comedy lands in register: 16/16 comic items funniness-2, 16/16 character/situation-sourced, 16/16 non-portable, 0 workshopped, 0 narrator-overlay, mechanisms varied. The round-1 MONOTONOUS verdict is resolved at the source — the recognitional `the way [X]` cap breach (7 → 0), the `, which` deadpan-caption cluster (5 → 0), the twinned "a lie with [X]" snowclones (2 → 0), the twinned inverse-attention paradox (2 → 0), and the fiscal-antithesis debt figure are all gone, and the repairs introduced no replacement wit.

- **Strongest surviving:** L19 "You met your feelings and issued a form." — character-sourced, non-portable, un-workshopped, doing the chapter's central diagnostic work in seven words, and legal under §2 (targets the act, not the sentence).
- **Weakest surviving:** L131 "It's explaining the joke before anyone tells it." — clears at funniness-2 but is the chapter's most quotable, portability-adjacent line. It passes only because it is June-generated (her sanctioned precise-work-critique care move), guarded in-scene ("She wasn't grading him. She was doing to the card what she'd done to the doorway"), and enacts the book's no-caption thesis. Non-blocking; if a later pass wants to de-risk the aphoristic shape, ground it harder to the specific clause on the card rather than cutting a thesis beat.

Per-criterion counter-candidates scrutinized (stance requirement): strongest *workshop*-candidate = L3 "Nobody counts folding chairs twice… unless…" (composed "Nobody does X unless Y" shape) — passes because it reports real behavior and names real displacement; strongest *portable*-candidate = L131 (above); residual *narrator-overlay* = L27 "a performance she wasn't giving today" — judged functional characterization, non-portable, flagged WATCH.

## REVISION ORDERS

**None blocking. The chapter is committable on comedy.**

No item is scored funniness-1, portable:yes, or workshopped:yes, and no verdict-level problem stands (density right, sweetness intact across all three protected beats, mechanisms varied, warmth floor held). Every round-1 blocking finding — the `the way [X]` cap breach, the `, which` caption cluster, the twinned "a lie with [X]" and inverse-attention snowclones, the fiscal antithesis, and the softening-bracket around Ben's fear — is resolved in the current text, and the repairs added no portable, workshopped, or overlay comedy.

The WATCH items above (calculation figure ×2, the L27 `which`-gloss, the L3 cold-open reuse, the Ben "checked twice" tic, the "left it" cluster) are non-blocking tracker notes, not revision orders. They do not gate the commit; they exist so the repaired families stay repaired in Ch24.
