Audit complete and written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_03.comedy_doctor.md`.

**Verdict: MONOTONOUS** — with the important caveat that the chapter's comedy mostly *lands* (56 of 70 inventoried items score funniness-2, overwhelmingly character-sourced and non-portable). The verdict is about concentration, not failure: every order is a cut or single-phrase conversion, no new jokes requested.

The headline finding: the **bureaucratic/fiscal register collision** in June's narration runs **10 instances** ("public record... file an objection," "filed away to feel bad about," "fiscal quarter," "budgeted for... spent," "filed the two of them as a unit... accepted the filing," "registered and declined to interpret," etc.). This is the exact figure tics.md put under a hardening monitor after chapter 02 (count then: 3), and chapter 02's comedy audit had already ordered June's filing metaphor preserved for Turn 3. It has now hardened into a tic — and it isn't even her idiom: her voice card licenses optical/craft language, which outperforms the admin wit everywhere the chapter uses it. The register earns its keep only in her *dialogue* armor ("That's collateral." / "It's wool." — the chapter's strongest item, where Mara's puncture is the care), and ten narration instances bury that contrast.

On your specific flags:

- **Portable workshop wit**: blocked four — "grow a third act" (dramaturgy register, not June's), the "X the way other people Y" aphorism frame (a *second offense* — chapter 02 ordered out the identical template in "She read the way other people argued"), "course record," "zip code."
- **Cohort intro lines**: six-for-six bullseyes in lines 31–49 against the chapter card's "not epigram contest" warning. Ordered two de-polishes (Mara's composed "week six" button, Ruth's "for errors, out of habit, without malice" triple tag); Sam, Ben, Luis, and Priya's intros are licensed shapes and stand.
- **Softening June's embarrassment**: only one instance — the "course record" tag, ordered cut. The survivability is otherwise earned structurally (seven wrong portraits, "bad in public, on schedule, twice a minute"), which is exactly what the card mandates.
- **Repeated drawing-badness/logistics mechanisms**: pass with work shown — six distinct mechanisms, each keyed to a different character's wound.
- **Odile quotability**: 11 aphorism-grade lines — passes at absolute ceiling because each rail line is a tailored diagnosis and the functional ballast ("Again," surname calls) holds pressure. The stubs line survives on triple load (seating plant, unit-filing, aunt-knowledge reread clue). Forward cap noted: chapter 05's class scene should hold her to roughly half this count.

15 blocking revision orders plus tracker updates are in the file; the chapter is not committable until they're resolved.
