Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_19.comedy_doctor.md`. Verdict: **CLEAR, with five blocking findings** — the chapter is not committable until they're repaired.

The inventory found 14 attempted comic items: nine land (funniness-2), five are partial (funniness-1), and all five partials are blocking. What lands is exactly what the chapter card ordered — the strongest item is Ben's aborted rotation ("He stopped. He folded the paper along its existing crease. 'Sorry.'"), with Mara's over-bought coffee, Priya's dal directive and its three-forkfuls payoff, Luis's "Glare," and Theo's "I can move the stool. In the painting." all character-sourced and non-portable. Density is low but defensibly so: the chapter dramatizes its own comic shortfall (the cohort's jokes stalling is the point), so it is not DRY.

The five blocking items all cluster where no character is generating the line — narrator-overlay wit in Theo-solo or ensemble-observation narration:

1. "Mara entered by inventory: hooks first, faces second" — workshopped epigram; order is to render the coat-hook counting as literal behavior.
2. The Mara-talks/Luis-tolerates clause — replays a stock dynamic the Ch13 arc beat already moved past.
3. "went back to his side of Mara" — composed echo decorating the exit of "Move it or paint it," which should leave the scene plain.
4. "His shoulder began advising against it" — the worst offender: portable, workshopped, and sweetening the penance beat (Theo refusing to walk to June's side), which the special checks explicitly said not to excuse for sadness.
5. "the correction sat there looking like a correction" — punchline-syntax triplet on a craft truism; order pins it to visible paint fact instead.

All special Ch19 sweeps passed: zero `crooked`, zero ledger/debt figures, zero clementine, zero `the way` connectives; the stool count ("Seven stools. Three stations got two. His got one.") verified as pressure rather than a revival of the spent Ch16 chair-count gag; Odile carries zero aphorism-grade lines, complying with the post-Ch16 plainness order. Luis's material verdicts sit at his two-per-appearance cap, not over. One non-blocking watch note logged for the tracker: "one plain second" is measured-duration-adjacent.
