# Comedy Doctor — Chapter 21 — Round 2 (verification)

audit: comedy_doctor | chapter: 21 | round: 2 | owner: claude | stance: skeptical verification of round-1 repairs, then full re-inventory per `checks/audits/comedy_doctor.md`
chapter text: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md` — verified byte-identical to `output/revision_snapshots/chapter_21/chapter_21.0012.20260704T140412Z.after_comedy_doctor_round1_repairs.md`; the diff between the `0010...before` and `0012...after` snapshots contains exactly the two ordered edits and nothing else.
round-1 audit: `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.comedy_doctor_round1.md` (21 items, 2 blocking, orders 1–2)
register commitment: guide §2 — warm, precise, lightly comic, every chapter; observational and character-true, never sitcom rhythm, never banter-for-banter. Target reader: the warm-book reader (O'Leary warmth, Henry at ~60% banter density, Morisaki quiet) who wants the smile braided into the feeling, not laid over it.
constraints carried from Dialogue Doctor round 2, honored below: Odile's shaped-line inventory at ceiling (no new zingers); "recognized the species" (103) and "keeping its own counsel" (115) are ceilings, not licenses; no door/forgiveness thesis naming; no re-explained consent logic; Odile line 29 at mass limit.

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## ROUND-1 REPAIR VERIFICATION

**Order 1 — EXECUTED.** Before: "That was the order his hands did things in, and the order told him who he was faster than a mirror could have: count first, feel later." After: "That was the order his hands did things in: count first, feel later." (3). The mirror clause is cut whole; the surviving sentence is the order's named example verbatim. Re-hunted the surviving colon for workshop syntax: it now introduces a literal procedural sequence the paragraph has just demonstrated (knife out of pocket before coat off; eight catalogs counted before the shame arrives at 5), not a snap comparison — the self-audit stays in cataloguer idiom as ordered. "mirror" has zero hits chapter-wide; the §6 epiphany-via-mirror brush is gone.

**Order 2 — EXECUTED.** Before: "He ate the soup because it was there and because not eating it would have been a performance with an audience of zero." After: "He ate the soup because it was there." (63). This is the order's sanctioned standalone execution. No replacement figure was coined, no Odile line added, no door/forgiveness naming, no hand beat added — constraint check passes on the diff. "performance" and "audience" have zero hits chapter-wide.

**Residue sweep** (current text): mirror, audience, performance, ledger, forgive/forgiveness, load-bearing — zero hits.

**Round-1 defect surfaced by the diff:** "Then he worked, because the building didn't stop needing things just because he had opinions about needing." (63) pre-exists the repair (present in the before-snapshot) and round 1 failed to inventory it. It is a comic attempt and is inventoried this round as item 15. Round 1's inventory was one item short; the omission is logged here, not excused.

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INVENTORY:

1 — "That was the order his hands did things in: count first, feel later." (3) — mechanism: procedural deadpan self-audit — source: character (his idiom is counts and sequences; the sentence names an order his hands just performed) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (hunted: "count first, feel later" alone could travel, but the sentence's content is the knife-before-coat action and the eight-catalog count; without the box and the route it says nothing) — dramatic work: plants count-first-feel-later, which the chapter spends (headcap thumbs at 5, knife at 49, drill at 65/105, empty hands at 117) — workshopped: no (re-hunted post-repair; the colon is inventory syntax, not punchline syntax). Repaired item; verified above.

2 — "his thumbs kept checking the headcap anyway because they didn't know what else to be" (5) — mechanism: deadpan synecdoche; autonomous-hands instance 1 — source: character (card: performs competence under stress) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (headcap, conservator handling, this box) — dramatic work: shame rendered through procedure per guide §2 interiority discipline — workshopped: no.

3 — "he didn't have to check the date because some dates filed themselves" (11) — mechanism: deadpan inversion of his filing idiom — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (loan-sheet world; the date is the day June stopped taking things from his hands) — dramatic work: grief made clerical without a ledger figure (Ch18 ban stays respected) — workshopped: no.

4 — "Ruth carried the box. Sam carried Ruth's bag and complained about the stairs." (15) — mechanism: bathos via flat report — source: character (Odile refuses to dramatize the delivery; the cohort texture does the smiling) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (Ruth, Sam, the walk-up, the route June built) — dramatic work: confirms the route excluded Theo while keeping the news survivable; the warmth floor holds without softening why the route exists — workshopped: no.

5 — "I opened the door. There was nothing to sign." (19) — mechanism: corrective literalism — source: character (card: declarative fragments complete in intent) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: kills his implication that she formally received the return; the route was built to require nothing from anyone — workshopped: no.

6 — "she looked back at him with no more preparation than she gave a wall" (21) — mechanism: deadpan comparison — source: character-focalized (Theo knows exactly how she looks at walls; in her building walls get her honest professional attention, so the figure cuts two ways on reread) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (gallerist domain knowledge only this focalizer has) — dramatic work: she performs no guilt before the confrontation begins — workshopped: no. Re-hunted as overlay this round; survives on the same domain grounding.

7 — "You know where everything in this building is better than I do, and I number the crates." (27) — mechanism: self-deprecating scale contrast — source: character (fact-stacking under stress, card-true) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: proves the errand was engineered, which is the accusation — workshopped: no.

8 — "Anyone with a library card could have read it to you." (29) — mechanism: reductio; insult-as-diagnosis — source: character (card licenses insult-as-diagnosis aimed at the person) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (anchored: the acknowledgments page really has been public paper for thirty years, which is her entire defense) — dramatic work: deflection visible as deflection (guide §2) — workshopped: no. DD holds this turn at mass limit; concur, no growth permitted.

9 — anger "came the size it actually was instead of the size he needed" (35) — mechanism: deflation — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (sized against this confrontation's stakes) — dramatic work: denies him righteous cover and forces the real question two sentences later — workshopped: no.

10 — the utility knife folding in, folding out (49) — mechanism: displacement prop; autonomous-hands instance 2 — source: situation/character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the knife opened the box that opened the chapter) — dramatic work: holds the beat after "It was partly your fault" without narration — workshopped: no.

11 — "There is soup upstairs. Barley. Eat before you decide anything else about yourself." (51) — mechanism: register collision plus specificity ("Barley." as one-word deadpan) — source: character (card care move: feeds without comment; same template as her card's "Eat. Then decide to be tragic.") — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: care delivered while absolution stays refused. Re-checked for OVERSWEETENED post-repair: passes — "partly your fault" is never walked back; the soup changes nothing about the verdict, only about lunch — workshopped: no (card-licensed template, not new coinage).

12 — "You will be less convenient." / "Yes." (55–57) — mechanism: deadpan pricing; timing (a two-word invoice, a one-word payment) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the entire route/usefulness economy of this book is required to make "convenient" land) — dramatic work: the boundary gets a cost and he accepts it on the page; the chapter's peak beat and its best joke are the same two lines — workshopped: no.

13 — clipboard hung "one degree straighter than he'd left it" (59) — mechanism: specificity overload — source: character (her exactness; his cataloguer's eye is the only instrument that could measure one degree) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: she concedes ownership (O.M.) and reasserts authority in the same gesture — workshopped: no.

14 — "He ate the soup because it was there." (63) — mechanism: bathos; deflation by refused reasoning — source: character (dry compliance with item 11's imperative, no ceremony, no editorial) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (hunted hardest here, since the repair produced it: the sentence's flatness is only funny against Odile's "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself" two paragraphs up — obedience delivered as logistics completes the care-without-absolution exchange; stripped of that setup it is just a man eating soup) — dramatic work: closes the soup beat without softening "partly your fault" and pivots him into work — workshopped: no. Repaired item; verified above. Strongest counter-argument considered: the joke is partly the absence of the cut joke; it survives because the setup-payoff with 51 is real and the target reader's register (Morisaki quiet) rewards exactly this flatness.

15 — "the building didn't stop needing things just because he had opinions about needing" (63) — mechanism: wry deflation; institutional fact against private mood — source: character (his usefulness economy; card: lists tasks, absorbs logistics) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (requires the building, the pallet, the humidity log, and eleven years of being the person the building needs) — dramatic work: moves him from confrontation into work without sulking and without a growth thesis; keeps the new boundary from curdling into a mood — workshopped: no, narrowly (hunted the needing/needing echo: it reads as a repetition his interiority would actually make mid-thought, not symmetrical punchline syntax; it is speakable and does not ask to be quoted). This is the ceiling for this shape — no further X-just-because-opinions-about-X constructions in this book. Missed by round 1; logged in the verification section.

16 — the wire left "a half-inch low on the left" (63, 73) — mechanism: inversion of his care move (the fixer declines the fix, twice); repetition-with-variation — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the first instance measures avoidance; the repeat after truly looking converts the same non-fix into respect for the painting's verdict — workshopped: no.

17 — the drill-as-alibi run: "he had the drill and a new D-ring in his jacket pocket to prove it" (65); "He stood there with a drill in his pocket, having taken the painting down in order to service its hardware" (69); callback "Each time he set it down like the drill." (105) — mechanism: prop comedy; self-deception escalated, then closed by repetition-with-variation — source: character/situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no (D-ring, this canvas, this liar) — dramatic work: the chapter's thesis in a prop — competence as hiding place; the callback converts the gag into the growth beat without naming growth — workshopped: no.

18 — "and she had found that, she had actually found the filled nail hole and given it four square inches" (67) — mechanism: incredulous repetition plus specificity overload — source: character (the cataloguer out-catalogued; professional disbelief at being seen by a better instrument) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the filled nail hole is his own maintenance work, painted back at him by June's painter-eye) — dramatic work: proves how exactly June saw him before he could see himself; sharpens the portrait's verdict without solemnity — workshopped: no. Not inventoried in round 1; added on this round's rebuild.

19 — "where a window would go if the painting were merciful" (67) — mechanism: deadpan conditional aside — source: character-focalized (a handler/painter reads composition placement; the mercy withheld is June's accuracy) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (this canvas only) — dramatic work: keeps the ekphrasis from going solemn while sharpening its verdict — workshopped: no.

20 — "hung it above the flat files and walked under it forty times" (71) — mechanism: self-indicting count — source: character (he counts; the count convicts) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: three weeks of avoidance made concrete, no weather required — workshopped: no.

21 — "a man who paints a woman he is pretending to date, from memory, without telling her, does not get to call it a study out loud" (77) — mechanism: escalating-qualifier self-indictment — source: character (over-precise self-audit; guilty-then-plain per card) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the fake-dating premise is the joke's entire load) — dramatic work: names the consent problem the rest of the scene then honors in object logic — workshopped: no (re-hunted: the long conditional subject is shaped, but only this book can parse it).

22 — "recognized the species, and deleted them back to nothing" (103) — mechanism: deadpan taxonomy — source: character (a cataloguer classifying his own reflex) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the apology-reflex caught and killed on the page, doing the work of the cut consent sermon — workshopped: no. DD ceiling: must not be extended; concur.

23 — "He wanted to move something and had nothing in reach worth moving." (105) — mechanism: incongruity — the fixer deprived of fixable objects — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (his entire coping inventory is this book's furniture) — dramatic work: renders the wait as character pressure, not clock; keeps scene 4 comic-adjacent without putting a quip near her reply — workshopped: no.

Considered and excluded (not comic attempts): "Eight books did not fill a nine-book gap." (9) — grief arithmetic, correctly unsmiling. "It was a foot in a door." (13) — figure, not comedy; door-adjacency remains routed to Narrator-Publicist/Plain Translation, no order. "a coffee in one hand, her own, no second cup" (15) — the withheld care move; the omission is the point and it is not smiling. "remembering it was not a crime" (87) — single legal-register brush, tracked below, not a joke. "He finished seating it. Then he looked." (107) — timing discipline, tension not comedy. "read it four times" (111) — straight count. "Okay, he typed, and sent it, and that was all." (113) — discipline, not comedy. "painted side keeping its own counsel against the brick" (115) — mild personification wit hunted as overlay; disposition unchanged from DD round 2: it is doing tenderness at the declared object-agency ceiling, not comedy; no order, must not be extended. "both hands empty" (117) — the hands family's payoff image; correct that it is not a joke.

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## RUNNING-GAG / TRACKER CHECKS (against `output/tics.md`, Ch17–21 rows)

- **Autonomous/competent hands:** 3 in-chapter instances (items 2, 10, plus the drill pocket in 17), closing to "both hands empty." Tics Ch21 row holds hands-body-watch at 16 and orders Ch22 reduction; the arc reads complete here. No Ch22 instance without transformation.
- **Drill-as-alibi:** opened and closed in-chapter (item 17); spent. Do not reuse the drill as a comic prop downstream.
- **Straightening/squaring (Ch01 cap-watch):** 1 instance (item 13), varied — Odile's gesture, not Theo's. Within cap.
- **Odile quotability:** at repaired ceiling per DD round 2 and the tics row. This round adds no Odile lines and orders none.
- **Counting/measurement comedy (Theo's owned idiom):** densest chapter yet (items 1, 7, 13, 18, 20, plus straight uses — eight/nine arithmetic, four reads). Licensed in a solo-Theo chapter; must not migrate into June's Ch22 POV.
- **Legal-clerical narration (capped Ch07/08, zero since):** one brush — "not a crime" (87). Single, situation-literal, below concern; add none in Ch22.
- **Ch20 spent families ("Noted", boring-parts, FEB = coat):** zero instances in Ch21; resting correctly.

## DISTRIBUTION CHECKS

- **Density:** 23 attempts across four scenes in a flagged emotional-peak chapter — the guide's lightly-comic commitment is met. The joke-free stretches (the fear-canvas verdict at 67–71 interior, the repainting of the study at 79–89) have a named reason: June's verdict and the door/hair corrections must land unsoftened; the drill gag correctly brackets the first and the wire non-fix brackets the second. Not DRY, not THIN.
- **Mechanism variety:** deadpan is the licensed base register; sub-mechanisms split: literalism (5, 6, 8), bathos/flat report (4, 14), specificity/count (7, 13, 18, 20), deflation (9, 15), prop/physical (10, 17), inversion (16), taxonomy (22), conditional aside (19), pricing/timing (12), incongruity (23), procedural deadpan (1), synecdoche (2, 3), self-indictment (21). Not MONOTONOUS.
- **Source polarity:** character ≈21, situation 2 (shared credit), narrator-overlay 0 full items after repairs. Round 1's only overlay instances were the two blockers; both are gone and nothing replaced them. The strongest remaining overlay candidates — items 6 and 15 and the excluded "keeping its own counsel" — were re-hunted above; the first two survive on focalizer domain grounding, the third is outside comedy remit at its declared ceiling.
- **Sweetness:** the danger points stay sharp — soup arrives with "partly your fault" unretracted (items 11, 14), and the boundary is priced, not blessed (item 12). Round 1's one local softening (the audience-of-zero clause) is cut; its replacement adds no sweetening. Not OVERSWEETENED.
- **Cringe:** none. No sitcom rhythm, no banter-for-banter, nothing that embarrasses the book in front of its reader.

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CHAPTER VERDICT: CLEAR

Both round-1 orders verified executed against the snapshot diff; the full rebuilt inventory (23 items) is majority funniness-2, character/situation-sourced, non-portable, mechanisms varied; zero narrator-overlay items survive; no partial, portable, or workshopped items stand.
Strongest item: **"You will be less convenient." / "Yes."** (55–57) — the chapter's peak dramatic beat and its best joke are the same two lines.
Weakest surviving item: **"the building didn't stop needing things just because he had opinions about needing"** (63) — it passes on character grounding and dramatic work, but the needing/needing echo is the closest thing in the chapter to a composed turn; it survives at its ceiling, not comfortably.

REVISION ORDERS:

None — no blocking findings and no verdict-level problems. The chapter is committable on comic grounds.

Standing constraints for any future touch (non-blocking, carried forward): item 15's echo shape must not recur in this book; items 22 and the excluded "keeping its own counsel" (115) remain DD-declared ceilings, not licenses; Odile's line inventory stays at ceiling; the drill and the audience-of-zero/mirror families stay dead; the autonomous-hands family rests in Ch22; Theo's counting comedy does not migrate into June's Ch22 POV. Constraint check on this round: no Odile zingers reintroduced, no door/forgiveness thesis naming, no consent-logic explanation touched.
