All banned-family strings return zero hits in the current text (the earlier lone match on line 37 was the word "inventory" in "The inventory steadied him" — Theo's own blocking-in noun, not the repaired Mara joke). The audit follows, in the required format.

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# Comedy Doctor — Chapter 19 (Final Verification, post-repair)

Audit target: `output/chapters/chapter_19.md` (current text, after comedy rounds 1–2 and plain-translation repairs).
Register commitment: warm, precise, lightly comic; character-true observational comedy; no sitcom rhythm (READING_GUIDE §2). Target reader: the O'Leary / 60%-Henry / Morisaki reader who wants the smile to come from who these people are, not from a narrator performing.

## Special current-text checks (adjudicated before inventory)

1. **Former narrator-overlay jokes — confirmed gone.** Checked each against the current text:
   - `Mara entered by inventory: hooks first, faces second` → absent. Current text (line 13): "Mara checked the hooks before she looked at the stations." Literal behavior, no caption. Clean.
   - `schedule only Ben could hear` → absent. Current text (line 43): "Priya and Ben traded the left side on the odd-weeks rotation, the folded paper never leaving Ben's pocket." The rotation is now the one Ben announced on the page; nothing is audible only to Ben. Clean.
   - Shoulder-advising line → absent. Current text (line 63): "By eight his shoulder hurt." Bare body fact. Clean.
   - Correction-looking-like-correction → absent. Current text (line 63): "the corrected place dried darker than the rest of the edge." Paint consequence, technically true (reworked passage drying darker), no self-regarding wit. Clean.
   - Mechanical scan for `inventory`/`schedule`/`advis` as joke vocabulary: the only survivor is "The inventory steadied him until he got to the seam" (line 37) — Theo's own noun for his blocking-in process, doing wound-work, not a gag. Cleared.
2. **`You can't leave it half` (line 57) — not portable wit.** Tested for quotation-shape: it is colloquially half-grammatical ("leave it half"), spoken flush against the literal object (the stool drawn straddling the pencil line on a divided ground), and Luis exits to the tap in the same breath — no beat held for applause. It carries a second meaning about June, but resonance is not quotability; the sentence cannot travel without the divided ground under it. Compare the line it replaced ("Move it or paint it"), which was symmetrical imperative-pair syntax — that shape is gone. Cleared.
3. **Chair/stool counts are pressure, not a revived count gag.** The Ch16 tracker row marks chair-count comedy spent; the current instances are "Seven stools. Three stations got two. His got one, on the wall side of the table" (line 7) and "He put the stools up, all seven" (line 83). Neither turns toward a punchline: the arithmetic terminates in the wound (the single stool), Mara converts the count into confrontation ("Everyone counted, Theo... The second we walked in. Everyone," line 53), and the closing "all seven" is restitution, not callback. The fragment cadence at line 7 flirts with the Ch16 joke shape but has no comic turn to complete it. Ruled pressure. Cleared, with a forward note: Ch20 should not count furniture at all.
4. **No new banned families.** Mechanical scan of current text: `crooked` 0, ledger/debt/owed/owing 0, clementine 0 (Priya's care move is dal — correct variation per Ch16 retirement), recognitional "the way" 0 (line 61's "any other way" is ordinary usage, not the connective), `load-bearing` 0, smirk/chuckle/"a beat" 0. Cleared.

## INVENTORY

1 — "lined two stools on opposite sides before he noticed what he had done" (line 5) — mechanism: habit-betrayal incongruity (muscle memory sets up for two) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: establishes June's absence as a physical fact Theo's hands don't yet believe; plants the stool as the chapter's load object — workshopped: no
2 — "he filled two before he could decide otherwise and left both, one on each side of the ground" (line 7) — mechanism: repetition-with-variation of #1, escalated from reflex to refused decision — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: plants the two jars that reappear in the painting (line 61) and in the final rinsed-jar image (line 83); gives Odile something to conspicuously not correct (line 35) — workshopped: no
3 — ""I over-bought coffee," she said. "Somebody has to take two."" (line 15; decays through the cold cup at line 59 and the "one untouched cup still seated" at line 81) — mechanism: transparent hosting pretext, then repetition-with-variation as the fiction collapses — source: character (Mara's voice-card smoothing: fills gaps, over-hosts) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — the words alone could travel, but the bit's charge is that the whole room has already counted stools against June's absence, and the pretext dies on the page in the untouched cup — dramatic work: shows the cohort absorbing the absence without naming it; the abandoned tray sharpens the ending rather than sweetening it — workshopped: no
4 — ""Glare," he said, and got out his palette." (line 17, after moving the table a hand-width) — mechanism: deadpan compression — source: character (Luis's one-sentence material verdicts) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: normalcy resuming around Theo; Luis caring through placement per card — workshopped: no. Cap check: Luis material verdicts run "Glare" plus "You can't leave it half" = 2, at the 2-per-appearance cap, not over; "You blocked in her stool" and "Nobody's going to ask what" are observation/pressure, not verdicts.
5 — ""I made a rotation for who paints when. Odd weeks I get the left, Priya gets-- I can print one for--" He stopped. He folded the paper along its existing crease. "Sorry."" (line 19; callback "the folded paper never leaving Ben's pocket," line 43) — mechanism: self-interruption cringe with recovery; Theo's "It's a good rotation" (line 21) is the grace beat — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the room negotiating what can be said at Theo's station; "existing crease" shows Ben re-swallowing the plan physically — workshopped: no. Tracker check: Ben's retired self-deprecation shapes ("not a personality" family, contingency-joke syntax) do not recur; this is a planning beat with new stakes (a partnerless station), which is what the Ch08 row demanded.
6 — ""There's dal in the green tub. Eat at break, not after." ... Theo ate three forkfuls of Priya's dal standing up because she was watching" (lines 31, 75) — mechanism: care-as-directive, paid off as surveillance-enforced compliance — source: character (Priya's card: feeding, conditions, control) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Priya's plain-speech floor lines ("Is June coming?" / "Is she sick?") get their sting from arriving between two care moves; the payoff shows Theo being kept alive by the cohort while he grieves — workshopped: no
7 — ""Cards are on your tables. Read them twice." ... He read the card twice, as told." (lines 35–37) — mechanism: literal-compliance deadpan — source: character (Odile's imperative economy; Theo's filial obedience) — funniness: 2 (marginal) — portable: no — dramatic work: "as told" is Theo's wound showing — he still runs on Odile's instructions — workshopped: no
8 — ""You blocked in her stool." / "It's the room." / "Nobody's going to ask what."" (lines 47–51) — mechanism: deadpan puncture of a deflection, with delay (Luis sets the jars down first) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: forces the chapter's subtext to the surface and hands the scene to Mara's "Everyone counted"; keeps the followability floor — a cold reader knows exactly what Luis is refusing to let stand — workshopped: no
9 — "said one quiet thing to Ruth that made Ruth take a rag to a corner" (line 69) — mechanism: elision — effect shown, content withheld — source: character (Odile teaching the person, not the room) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: keeps Odile plain in this chapter per the Ch16 quotability order while proving she is still conducting — workshopped: no
10 — "At nine Odile said, "Brushes," and the room turned toward the sink." (line 75) — mechanism: one-word imperative compression — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: class-clock authority; gets the chapter to the racking/label beat without ceremony — workshopped: no

Counter-candidates checked and ruled non-comic (not inventory): the stool arithmetic (line 7 — pressure, see special check 3); Sam moving the snack table three feet toward the radiator (line 33 — owned care choreography, no comic turn attempted); "her face reported nothing about any of it" (line 69 — Odile characterization in Theo's clerical diction, one verb, not a gag and not ledger-family); "a room he could have drawn with the lights off" (line 37 — competence idiom, no wit-layer); the assignment card epigraph (sanctioned flourish, instruction not joke); "the stain he had not been able to lift and was no longer sure he wanted to" (line 83 — object-bound, non-quotable, closes on the lock as the plain-translation repair ordered).

## Distribution checks

- **Density:** ten items across ~2,600 words, all smile-to-laugh grade, none loud. This is the low edge of "lightly comic," and the low edge is named and earned: the chapter is the first Tuesday of June's absence, and every comic beat is the cohort managing that absence — the guide's warmth floor working as designed. Not THIN: the comedy is where it should be (arrival, stations, break), absent only where it must be (the seam, the stool move, the label).
- **Mechanism variety:** habit-betrayal, escalating repetition, transparent pretext with decay, deadpan compression (x2, two different speakers with different targets), cringe-recovery, care-directive payoff, literal compliance, puncture, elision. No mechanism carries more than two items. Not MONOTONOUS.
- **Source:** 10/10 character or character-situation. Zero narrator-overlay survivors — the seven repaired items stayed dead and nothing regrew in their places.
- **Sweetness:** the sharp beats stay sharp. "Everyone counted, Teo" is not cushioned; Odile moving the stool gets "From here" and nothing else; the untouched cup ends the coffee bit on loss, not comfort. Not OVERSWEETENED.
- **Cringe:** nothing performs at the target reader; Ben's cringe is diegetic and repaired within the scene (warmth floor satisfied by "It's a good rotation"). Not CRINGE.
- **Odile quotability:** card + four plain utterances ("Read them twice," "From here," "Brushes," "Same time next week"). Effectively one aphorism-grade item (the card, which is licensed). Compliant with the Ch16 "plainer or absent" order.

## VERDICT

**CLEAR** — the comedy lands in register: all inventory funniness-2, all character/situation-sourced, non-portable, mechanisms varied, and the reduced density has a named dramatic reason (Week 7, June absent; the cohort's comedy is how the absence is carried).

Strongest surviving item: #5 — ""I made a rotation for who paints when. Odd weeks I get the left, Priya gets-- I can print one for--" He stopped. He folded the paper along its existing crease. "Sorry.""

Weakest surviving item: #7 — "He read the card twice, as told." — a two-word tag doing real character work, but the smallest charge in the chapter; it survives because "as told" is Theo's wound, not a wink.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. Zero items scored funniness-1, zero portable, zero workshopped; all four special current-text checks cleared with evidence above. No verdict-level problem stands.

Forward watch for Ch20 (tracker handoff, not orders on this chapter): furniture counting is fully spent (Ch16 + this chapter's pressure use); Luis material verdicts sit at cap again; the two-jars/rinsed-jar image belongs to this chapter and should not become a standing symbol; Mara's tray/cup pretext is closed by the untouched cup — no reprise.
