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# Comedy Doctor — Chapter 14 (Catalogs)

Stance: skeptical professional edit. Register tested: warm, precise, lightly comic; character/situation-sourced; adult romantic pressure with wit inside ordinary work (READING_GUIDE §2; Emily Henry at ~60% banter density; no sitcom rhythm). Chapter brief: dread inside competence — comedy must release awkwardness without blunting the catalog danger.

`INVENTORY:`

1 — "moved the clipboard to the far end of the table so that the next mistake would at least require a walk" (line 3) — mechanism: deflation (competence-as-symptom; self-thwarting logistics) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the repeated wrong date is November 17, the kiss date) — dramatic work: kiss intrusion rendered through failed competence, exactly the packet's opening order — workshopped: no

2 — torn index card: "nine size options... torn it in half. The surviving half said *1. 16x20* and *2. 12x16*, with the original numerals 8 and 9 scribbled out" (line 9) — mechanism: artifact comedy (escalation revealed in object, then deflated) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: over-preparation as desire tell; Theo practicing decisiveness; sets up the "dead seven" volley — workshopped: no

3 — "She had texted back a thumbs-up at 11:05. He stopped interpreting it after midnight." (line 9) — mechanism: deadpan understatement (overanalysis named by its end time) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (anchored to the two promised size options and their timestamps) — dramatic work: post-kiss signal-reading anxiety without a feelings paragraph — workshopped: no

4 — Ben: "What weight cardstock. Don't say 'normal.'" (line 11) — mechanism: character-voice compression (precision fuss as anxiety) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (Ben's planning-as-love wound aimed at the flyer of the kiss; new shape, not the retired self-deprecation family) — dramatic work: thread treats the photo as ordinary, which the packet says makes it worse — workshopped: no

5 — Mara: "Don't crop them apart this time, P." / Priya: "Cropping nothing. This sells the class." (line 11) — mechanism: callback with reversal (Ch13 crop threat inverted) — source: situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: public proof hardening toward print; forty copies as pressure — workshopped: no

6 — "He made himself look at it standing up, as if it were a delivery manifest." (line 13) — mechanism: register collision (logistics frame on the kiss photo) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (Theo's literal job object; the packet's planned photo-as-public-proof comparison) — dramatic work: avoidance made visible as procedure — workshopped: no

7 — umber cuff: "I'm keeping it." / "It's umber." / "It's a decent brown. Raw umber holds its value." / "For some other emergency." (lines 27–31) — mechanism: deadpan deflection with craft pun (pigment value/kept value) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: June keeps the kiss's physical mark while refusing the conversation; inverts Ch13's spent solvent/sleeve beat (cleanup offered, declined) — workshopped: no

8 — "the alternative conversation had no agenda, no end time, and no chairs" (line 33) — mechanism: register collision tricolon (meeting logistics applied to feelings) — source: character (free-indirect Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (chairs are live scene objects: stacked in fours at line 63, paid off at line 149) — dramatic work: names why Theo chooses logistics; plants the chair runner — workshopped: no (strongest workshopped counter-candidate in the chapter; see checks)

9 — "Don't tell your panel I said the tape's carrying it." / "The tape knows." (lines 43–45) — mechanism: shared deadpan, mock-secret — source: character (June's precise-praise care move; Theo's two-word completion) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (requires DECORATOR'S WHITE. FLAT. and Ch13's praise; line 7 has already made the tape a desire proxy) — dramatic work: praise re-charged as intimacy without a feelings line — workshopped: no

10 — "Nine." / "I was trying to account for... No. I cut it down." / "Show me the dead seven sometime." (lines 53–57) — mechanism: deadpan echo + self-interruption converted to commitment — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: mutates the capped June-caps-Theo-optionality volley into Theo self-capping; "sometime" books future Thursdays — workshopped: no

11 — "Sixteen-by-twenty reads like a statement. Twelve-by-sixteen reads like a room you actually left at nine forty... Nobody gets to sprawl." (line 59) — mechanism: incongruity (canvas size argued as ethics) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (nine forty is this book's clock) — dramatic work: first delivered opinion after the midnight promise; encodes joint-piece honesty without solving it — workshopped: no

12 — "He said the chairs got stacked in fours, in case the chairs mattered." (line 63) — mechanism: deadpan literalism (bathos as avoidance) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: circling-the-subject texture; second chair plant for line 149 — workshopped: no

13 — "So now the label's going to be a refusal with my name under it" (line 69) — mechanism: self-deprecating reframe (label as confession) — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: motivates the catalog request — the trap's engine; wit generating plot, not decorating it — workshopped: no

14 — Odile: "Labels are not apologies." / "Then you were roughly right." / "What do I write, you are about to ask. Fewer words than you are planning." / narration: "that was the entire visit." (lines 71–83) — mechanism: preemption + brutal economy + visit-length deflation — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: plant #5; she arms the trap in true partials and never explains — workshopped: no

15 — "a man who knew another woman's storage by feel" (line 85) — mechanism: register collision (infidelity frame on archive logistics) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the chapter's thesis in one image — Theo's intimate knowledge is the leak; comedy that raises dread instead of relieving it — workshopped: no

16 — "She loans nothing. There's a sign about it in her head." (line 99) — mechanism: concretized policy (hyperbole) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (rides the hand-amended-signage reread motif from Ch01; flags the anomaly June marks with "Huh") — dramatic work: tells the alert reader Odile's generosity is the trap — workshopped: no

17 — "*Untitled (Stove)* is a title wearing a fake mustache." / "The parenthesis was probably Odile's condition." / "The checklist in back still files it under Stove." (lines 107–113) — mechanism: comic image + dry corroboration — source: character (June + Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no as an exchange (the image alone could travel; Theo's two replies pin it to Odile's label politics and leak his insider knowledge) — dramatic work: label pedagogy June came for; rhymes with the book's fake-label premise — workshopped: no

18 — "This the famous one?" / "*Winter Kitchen.* It was on a postcard for a while." + the two-second ceremony (lines 119–123) — mechanism: deflation of the sacred object — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: sanctioned WK invocation 2/5 with zero nostalgia; Theo flattening his family's masterpiece is concealment; June's two seconds is growth from Ch01's goodbye — workshopped: no

19 — "You're bagging them like produce." / "I'm bagging them like nine pounds of someone's career." (lines 139–141) — mechanism: simile volley, correction-as-escalation — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the handoff's wrongness said aloud while staying helpful; "someone's" is the lie in miniature (he can't say whose career he knows it is); releases awkwardness while sharpening the danger — workshopped: no

20 — "Plural, so you can watch me kill the weak ones." (line 145) — mechanism: self-aware bravado (cull idiom) — source: character — funniness: **1** — portable: **yes** (kill-your-darlings-adjacent workshop bravado; could sit unchanged in any writer/artist novel) — dramatic work: Tuesday commitment; invites Theo into her process — workshopped: no

21 — "Six p.m. chairs or nine forty chairs?" / "Both. I'll count both before Tuesday." (lines 149–151) — mechanism: repetition-with-variation payoff (chairs ×3, the 6:00/9:40 split, the chosen-facts label lesson, all converging) — source: character + situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: keeps the joint piece alive as flirtation conducted entirely through work; the target reader's exact register — workshopped: no

22 — "got sixteen inches, got sixteen inches again, and measured a third time anyway" (line 157) — mechanism: structural repetition (mirrors the opening's three wrong dates) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: dread inside competence as the closing image; the chapter ends on symptom, not on a quip — workshopped: no

**Checks performed (evidence for the verdict):**

- **Density:** 22 items across ~3,050 words; correct for "lightly comic" carrying a dread chapter. Comedy thins where it must: the stockroom passage (lines 85–91) carries only item 15, and the failed-inventory close (lines 155–157) carries only item 22's structural wryness. The catalog danger is never joked away.
- **Mechanism variety:** deadpan ×5, deflation ×4, register collision ×3, callback/repetition-with-variation ×4, plus artifact, preemption, simile volley, hyperbole, echo, structural mirror. Not MONOTONOUS.
- **Source:** character 18, situation 4, narrator-overlay 0. Free-indirect candidates audited against Theo's voice card (items 1, 6, 8, 15, 22): all run on his documented logistics idiom and live scene objects, not portable narrator wit.
- **Workshopped counter-candidates examined and passed:** item 8 (tricolon punchline syntax — survives because the chairs are real scene objects with two later payoffs and the logic is Theo's documented avoidance shape); item 17 ("fake mustache" has punchline shape — survives as an exchange because Theo's corroborating replies do character and plot work).
- **Focused check, size-card exchange:** the task names a "footnotes" exchange; the committed text runs that joke through the torn card's rack-fit/wall-math notes instead (items 2, 10). Audited as found; lands.
- **Focused check, Ch13 spent logistics texture:** every inherited prop carries a new mechanism or new pressure — pickup sheet → wrong-date intrusion (item 1); panel sizes → torn-card artifact plus a delivered opinion (items 2, 11); solvent/sleeve → inverted, June keeps the mark (item 7); flyer photo → print permanence, cardstock and forty copies (items 4, 5). No pure inheritance found; the guardrail is satisfied by variation, not abstinence.
- **Tracker:** *Winter Kitchen* 2/5, one invocation, deflationary (compliant). Odile ~3 quotable lines in one short visit (within post-Ch03 ceiling). "Labels are not apologies" revives the Ch07-retired apology critique noun, but packet step 5 explicitly licenses this exact line — sanctioned; no further apology-noun reuse downstream. June-caps-Theo-optionality: mutated (Theo self-caps; June ratifies "You're right about the sprawl") — a varied instance, not a third repeat. Recognitional "the way a person/people": zero generic instances; three self-habit "the way she/it" constructions (lines 23, 85, 105) fall outside the banned family but are accumulating as a sentence shape — log to tics, non-blocking here. No smirk/chuckle/"a beat"; "one breath of a laugh" (line 47) is a laugh-render, already gate-watched, not breath-catching. Zero new ", which" captions.
- **Sweetness:** the handoff and the ending stay sharp; item 19 sharpens the transfer via dramatic irony rather than cushioning it. Not OVERSWEETENED.
- **Cringe:** none; longest volley is three turns; no sitcom rhythm; nothing lands at a character's unrepaired expense.

**CHAPTER VERDICT: CLEAR** — 21 of 22 items at funniness 2, character/situation-sourced throughout, zero narrator-overlay, mechanisms varied, and the comedy consistently does dramatic work that feeds the trap rather than decorating it.

- Strongest item: **#19** — "You're bagging them like produce." / "I'm bagging them like nine pounds of someone's career." The chapter's whole proposition in one volley: helpfulness, weight, and the unsayable "someone's."
- Weakest surviving item: **#12** — "He said the chairs got stacked in fours, in case the chairs mattered." A gentle smile on its own; it survives because it is the second plant for item 21's payoff.

One blocking finding stands (item 20); the chapter is not committable until it is resolved.

`REVISION ORDERS:`

1. **Item 20** — "Tuesday," June said... "I'll come with label drafts. Plural, so you can watch me kill the weak ones." (line 145). **Failure:** funniness 1 and portable — "kill the weak ones" is kill-your-darlings-adjacent workshop bravado that any writer/artist character in any book could speak, and the chapter has already done the culling idea better twice (Theo's dead seven, item 10; June's "The bad ones teach the fence line," line 129). **Fix:** keep "Tuesday," keep "Plural," keep the invitation for Theo to watch her work — that is the dramatic payload — and rebuild the punch from this chapter's own inventory: the *View from the back room, six p.m.* lesson June just extracted (line 125: "the facts are *chosen*" — let her promise to choose facts in front of him), or a varied callback to the dead-seven volley she opened (she brings her own nine and reports the kill count Tuesday), in her registered diction (edge, value, decent, exact). Do not soften it into politeness; cutting the clause after "Plural," entirely is also acceptable — the word "Plural," already carries most of the joke.

CLEAR
