# Audit: Comedy Doctor — Chapter 24: First Snow

id: comedy_doctor | chapter: 24 | owner: claude | tier: risk
trigger: flag:comic-register (reading-guide-mandated => every-chapter)

## Stance / calibration
Skeptical editor, not coach. Judged against the reading guide's target reader: the warm, character-driven contemporary reader the comps name — Beth O'Leary's found-family warmth, Emily Henry **at ~60% banter density**, the quiet of *Before the Coffee Gets Cold*. That reader wants observational, character-true dryness (June's self-aimed jokes, Theo's over-competent flailing, Odile's brutal economy), not sitcom rhythm and not composed zingers. Register is "lightly comic; quiet interiority over quippiness." A line that would earn a workshop laugh but read as manufactured to that reader fails here.

This is a showcase-coda / emotional-peak chapter. The comedy's job is to keep warmth from curdling into sentiment while leaving the two sharp beats — the portrait reveal (Scene 07) and Odile's ledger reveal — un-jokes. I checked density, mechanism variety, source honesty (narrator-overlay is the default I hunted), sweetness, and cringe. I also verified the repaired families the brief named did not resurrect (see foot).

---

## INVENTORY

1 — "She left it a tower and counted that, privately, as growth." (l.3) — mechanism: deadpan self-deprecation (compose-vs-tower) — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: plants June's performing-wound and the cup-arc that pays off at l.95 — workshopped: no
2 — "said the radiator sounded like it was trying to leave the building" (l.7) — mechanism: appliance personification — source: situation (line requires no specific Sam) — funniness: 1 — portable: **yes** — dramatic work: June's guard drops; she laughs with the cup half full — workshopped: no  **[BLOCKING]**
3 — "It was a good flyer." / "in a font he'd visibly agonized over" (l.9) — mechanism: deadpan understatement + earnest-amateur incongruity — source: character (Ben/June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: empty-vs-full-room theme; Ben characterization — workshopped: no
4 — "either a dog or a sofa and refused to commit" (l.11; reprise l.85) — mechanism: incongruity + object-personification — source: character (June painter-eye) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: reads Sam's canvas and June's eye; l.85 reprise varies (functional) — workshopped: no
5 — "hung so precisely you could have leveled a shelf against them" (l.11) — mechanism: precision-hyperbole — source: character (Luis/June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: characterizes Luis via his own level/shim idiom — workshopped: no
6 — "I've got a level in the car. Two minutes." (l.27) — mechanism: incongruity (art-as-defect) / installer reflex — source: character (Sam) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: sets up Theo's restraint; enacts Sam's fix-it care move — workshopped: no
7 — "It's meant to lean," + "Now he went to top off a water jar that didn't need it" (ll.27–29; reprise l.61) — mechanism: deflation/restraint + displacement-action — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Theo's growth, declining "the sermon" — workshopped: no
8 — "Twice. Once for no reason. Here." (l.37) — mechanism: deadpan self-deprecation — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: nerves and care riding the blue-dish handoff — workshopped: no
9 — "Four inches toward the easels put it in the sightline… 'There,' Luis said." + Mara declining to translate (ll.39–43) — mechanism: character-precision comedy + arc-restraint payoff — source: character (Luis/Mara) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: two cohort payoffs at once (Luis's placement care; Mara's arc) — workshopped: no
10 — "It had too much milk." (l.45) — mechanism: care-as-projection + deadpan — source: character (Priya/June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Priya's care-becomes-control; June learning to be handed things — workshopped: no
11 — "For Ben, practically skywriting." (l.47) — mechanism: incongruity via deadpan hyperbole (tiny gesture = huge for Ben) — source: character (June about Ben) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Ben's loosening (off-level on purpose) — workshopped: no *(watch: the "for X, practically Y" frame is a portable template; do not let it recur)*
12 — "No. That's the point of Ruth." (l.67) — mechanism: deadpan understatement — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: characterizes Ruth's discretion in four words — workshopped: no
13 — "I've been carrying paragraphs around in my pocket all night and not saying them… I don't know how you've done it your entire life." (l.73) — mechanism: self-image comedy in Theo's carrying-idiom — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: restraint costing him; opens his vulnerability — workshopped: no
14 — "Practice… And I say mine to myself later. Worse for you, better for the party." (l.75) — mechanism: deadpan deflection — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: names her lifelong compression while deflecting it — workshopped: no
15 — "Bring it whenever… That's why dishes exist." (l.79) — mechanism: warm care-logic + slip/recovery ("Bring it Tuesday" → no more Tuesdays) — source: character (Mara) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: dish-tether payoff; the ache of the last Tuesday — workshopped: no *(sweetness watch — cleared: tethered to the concrete dish, not free-floating slogan)*
16 — "neither of them looking eleven minutes apart tonight." (l.81) — mechanism: callback specificity — source: character/situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Priya/Ben distance closing — workshopped: no
17 — "a decent bar on Orchard that would hold them for twenty minutes" (l.83) — mechanism: situational deflation (host repels early collectors) — source: character (Theo host reflex) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: buys the cohort its last hour — workshopped: no
18 — "the Hallorans parked wherever collectors go to wait for permission to want a thing" (l.111) — mechanism: gentle-satire generalization — source: **narrator-overlay** (a class-generalization about "collectors," not a specific body doing a specific thing) — funniness: 2 — portable: **yes** — dramatic work: June's outsider-eye + a thematic rhyme with her own permission-to-want arc — workshopped: **yes** (epigram shape)  **[BLOCKING]**
19 — "You're work that left the building. I keep a record." (l.113) — mechanism: Odile economy (inventory metaphor) — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: care disguised as logistics; opens the ledger reveal — workshopped: no
20 — "I'm retiring, not dead." (l.125) — mechanism: deadpan / Odile economy — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: keeps Odile appetitive and un-sainted; states her real motive — workshopped: no
21 — "Give them the drawings and the wine and none of my time." (l.137) — mechanism: Odile economy (cutting tricolon) — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: her retirement stance and disdain, from inside character — workshopped: no
22 — "she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying." (l.145) — mechanism: self-aware warmth / deadpan — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: renders feeling through deflection (interiority discipline held) — workshopped: no
23 — "The warm coat was a February problem, a Kessler-in-March problem, an eight-hundred-dollars-by-Thursday problem." + "she was in training" (l.155) — mechanism: escalation/list (vague → brutally dated) + deadpan — source: character (June's money-cognition) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: lands the precarity stakes and her chosen-hard-life — workshopped: no *(watch: rising anaphoric tricolon is a composed shape; keep it a one-off, per the three-part-cadence watch in tics.md)*
24 — "hand two rich people some drawings. That's it. I'm not carrying anything." (l.157) — mechanism: self-correction/deflation — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: his carrying-arc growth + deflates the collectors from inside character; frames June's independence — workshopped: no
25 — "You're not carrying anything," June agreed, and… hooked the portfolio into the crook of the same arm. (l.159) — mechanism: callback/echo + demonstration — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: earned-stay thesis — her own water, work, walk — workshopped: no

**Running-gag / cap notes.** Dog-or-sofa 2× (l.11/l.85, reprise varies). Water-jar-that-didn't-need-filling 2× (l.29/l.61) — Theo's displacement, deliberate. "Not carrying anything" is a 2-beat volley (l.157/l.159), closed. Collector-deflation appears 3× across three voices (l.111 overlay, l.137 Odile, l.157 Theo) — not monotonous by mechanism/speaker, but l.111 is the weak overlay member (see RO2; cutting it also thins the cluster to two character-sourced beats). Odile carries ~3 aphorism-grade lines (19/20/21), inside her licensed ceiling.

---

## DISTRIBUTION CHECKS

- **Density (vs. register):** Appropriate for "lightly comic." Warm-dry beats are spread through every scene except the portrait scene (Scene 07, ll.89–107), which is correctly joke-free — that is the emotional core (June turning the study, the ache of being painted un-seeing). Named reason present; not DRY, not THIN.
- **Mechanism variety:** Deadpan is the dominant *register* (correct — June, Theo, and Odile are all dry), but the mechanisms underneath vary: personification, incongruity, precision-hyperbole, restraint/deflation, care-as-projection, arc-restraint payoff, self-image comedy, escalation/list, self-correction, callback. Not MONOTONOUS.
- **Source:** Overwhelmingly character-sourced; situation is minor (radiator, early-collectors beat). Genuine narrator-overlay is rare — essentially only item 18. This is the chapter's strength and the reason it clears: the wit mostly comes from inside these people, not painted over them.
- **Sweetness (OVERSWEETENED?):** No. The sharp beats stay sharp — the portrait scene takes no joke, and Odile's "It wasn't yours to run." / "No… It wasn't." is not softened. The snow close is deliberately anti-sentimental: the money-list and "two rich people some drawings" hold the sweetness *off*, and the final image is sober ("a long cold way to go and eight hundred dollars due Thursday, and she went"). Cohort warmth is delivered through action (placement, coffee, off-level flyer), not a group-absolution speech or found-family slogan; "That's why dishes exist" is the closest approach and it stays welded to the concrete dish. Not oversweetened.
- **Cringe:** None. No sitcom rhythm, no reader-embarrassing zinger. The art-world needle ("none of my time," "two rich people some drawings," and the flagged l.111) is gentle, not contempt — within the guide's "gentle comedy fine; contempt off-register" line.

---

## CHAPTER VERDICT

**CLEAR** — comedy lands in register: 23 of 25 items are funniness-2, character/situation-sourced, non-portable, with varied mechanisms; the two sharp beats are protected from jokes and the warmth never tips into slogan.

- **Strongest surviving item:** "hand two rich people some drawings. That's it. I'm not carrying anything." (l.157) — funny, fully welded to Theo's carrying-arc, and doing the most dramatic work in the chapter (his growth and June's independence in one deflection), gentle collector-satire generated from inside a character in dialogue.
- **Weakest surviving item:** "hung so precisely you could have leveled a shelf against them" (l.11) — a mild dry hyperbole that only pays for a reader tracking Luis-the-level-man; it lands, but it is the closest survivor to a 1. Leave it; do not inflate it.

**Two blocking line-items stand and must be resolved before commit** (a CLEAR distribution does not exempt portable/overlay/partial items):

## REVISION ORDERS

1. **l.7 — "said the radiator sounded like it was trying to leave the building."** Failure: **portable** + **funniness-1**. Machine-tries-to-escape is a stock old-building personification that would sit unchanged in any walk-up novel, and it is not welded to Sam (a generic character could say it) or to this studio's material. Fix — **re-source, don't cut the guard-drop beat, and do not zinger it**: give it to Sam's installer ear (his voice card: level in the car, installer's reflex) as a *specific* mechanical read of the knock — a steam trap, air in the line, water hammer — so the observation could only come from this man, or hand it to June's painter/material eye tied to the actual radiator she is standing against all night (the ticking pipes at ll.3, 89, 101). The repair is specificity, not volume. Cutting to Sam's "Huh"/level beat alone is also acceptable, but re-welding keeps the moment June laughs half-full.

2. **l.111 — "the Hallorans parked wherever collectors go to wait for permission to want a thing."** Failure: **narrator-overlay** (a class-generalization about "collectors," the LLM-default wit-layer) + **portable** (drops into any art-world book) + **workshopped** (epigram shape). The thematic rhyme with June's permission-to-want arc is real and worth keeping — but the *sentence as written* is a general witticism, not a specific character's specific act. Fix: replace the generalization with a specific observed Halloran action that shows the same deference (they stand exactly where Theo left them, not touching the Rauch, waiting to be told the drawings are theirs), welding the wit to this scene; **or** cut it and let the two collector-deflations already generated from inside character carry the needle — Odile's "none of my time" (l.137) and Theo's "two rich people some drawings" (l.157). Do not keep the class-generalization.

---

## Repair-hold confirmation (families the brief named)
- **Dialogue-diagnosis / sentence-quality jokes:** none resurrected. The Round-1 economy-caption ("let four words carry it") and the Priya statement-vs-question caption are gone (ll.29, 45); no joke rates how anyone phrased something.
- **`which` captions:** none. l.43's "who two months ago would have translated…" is character-arc narration, not an evaluative `, which` caption.
- **`whole` templates:** none present.
- **Deflecting-tag family (Ch22, frozen):** not refilled — no "for no defensible reason" / "which was not a plan" shapes; l.3 "privately" and l.89 "errand-shaped decision" do real self-knowledge work and are not of that family.
- **Over-workshopped deadpan:** the two blocking items above cover it; watches logged at item 11 (the "for X, practically Y" frame) and item 23 (the rising-"problem" tricolon).
