# Audit: Comedy Doctor — Chapter 05, Round 2 (post-repair verification)

Stance: skeptical professional editor. Every repair re-pressed against the current text; full inventory rerun on the committed chapter, not the memo's claims.

## REPAIR VERIFICATION

1. **Luis/strap quip — VERIFIED.** Line 13 now reads: *carried both their totes after one look at her strap and a quiet, "Weight's wrong."* The portable liability hyperbole is gone. The replacement is direct speech, two words, built from Luis's card vocabulary (weight/level/signal) and his one-short-sentence dialogue mass. The carrying-both-totes care move survives intact and the diagnosis now makes it visible instead of decorating it. Pressed for workshopping: none — it is too short to have punchline syntax and could not appear in another book without Luis.
2. **Gray-wool scar simile — VERIFIED CUT.** Line 15: *"She tugged a corner of gray wool out of her collar as evidence."* The sentence ends there. The narrator-overlay simile is gone; the tugged wool alone carries the bit, as ordered. No softened residue.
3. **Studio history — VERIFIED.** Line 23: *"a plank-floored room with old screw holes along the long wall and a darker stripe of varnish where something had once been bolted down."* The any-old-building quip is gone. Note the replacement is not a comic item and does not pretend to be — it is smallness-test material evidence read by June's installer eye, which is what the order asked for. The detail also quietly feeds line 91's plain stated fact (*"a former sweatshop"*), which is the order's fallback shape and carries no joke. The room-history beat exits the comic inventory legitimately; chapter density does not miss it.
4. **Theo's callback — VERIFIED.** Line 31: *"I did not pocket any new stubs," he said when she got there. "I want that on the record after last week."* The craft-false "premoistened"/"tin incident" referent is gone; the callback now pays the real Chapter 03 inventory (the pocketed stubs, the count to eight, Odile's hoarder diagnosis). June's reply at line 33 — *"The count came to eight," June said. "The evidence was mixed."* — replaces the unsourced "sealed correctly" with the incident's actual arithmetic, and "evidence" is card-owned June vocabulary (she treats desire as evidence against herself; it also rhymes forward from Mara's wool-as-evidence at line 15). The on-the-record denial shape round 1 licensed is preserved; the referent problem is resolved. Full-form "I did not" is emphasis-for-the-record, licensed.
5. **Ugly-drawing catalog — VERIFIED.** Line 89: *"The ear had drifted half an inch outboard of the head."* The "attached by optimism" abstract-noun tag is gone; every surviving catalog entry is an optical fact a painter's eye could generate.
6. **Rubber-band line — VERIFIED CUT.** Line 109: *"it fought the curve, and she had to bring the old roll out of her tote and loop the rubber band from Sonia's twice to get them to hold together, two Tuesdays in one cylinder."* The personification is gone. The beat now ends on physical resistance and the two-Tuesdays fact, unjoked — which is what the keep decision needed. The oversweetening finding is resolved.

Mechanical gate concurs: open=0, no BANNED hits in chapter 05.

## INVENTORY

1 — "with Mara's scarf folded over her forearm like a waiter presenting it, which she understood, too late, was the wrong way to return a scarf" (line 9) — mechanism: self-aware social-staging cringe — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: opens the return-vs-keep argument the chapter ends on — workshopped: no
2 — "It could not. She had checked twice anyway." (line 9) — mechanism: deadpan self-exposure — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: attraction rendered as verification ritual, no feeling named — workshopped: no
3 — "The plan had survived the subway and most of the stairs." (line 11) — mechanism: deflation/foreshadow — source: character+situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: arms the bin decision at line 107; first leg of the "plan" runner — workshopped: no
4 — "after one look at her strap and a quiet, 'Weight's wrong.'" (line 13) — mechanism: two-word diagnosis deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Luis's care move executed in his materials register; sets up his "Move left" beat at line 103 — workshopped: no — **[REPAIRED, passes]**
5 — "made the face of a woman watching a guest try to wash dishes at a dinner party" (line 13) — mechanism: precise social analogy — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: predicts exactly how the scarf return will fail — workshopped: no
6 — "She tugged a corner of gray wool out of her collar as evidence." (line 15) — mechanism: deadpan proof-display — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: physically defeats June's return plan; "evidence" plants the line-33 echo — workshopped: no — **[REPAIRED, passes]**
7 — "Then it's better than when I lent it, and you definitely can't give it back. That's how loans work." (line 19) — mechanism: confident false logic — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: defeats June's plan in dialogue — workshopped: no
8 — "settled the way Mara settled questions, by carrying them inside with her" (line 19) — mechanism: literalized abstraction — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: scene-closer; Mara's smoothing as physical motion — workshopped: no (epigram-shaped; counted in the watch)
9 — "It sat better than her own coat collar did, which she chose not to develop as a thought." (line 21) — mechanism: aborted-thought deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: attraction-denial without a body tell — workshopped: no
10 — "considered the room's geometry, and dragged one stool four inches left with her foot" (line 27) — mechanism: visual precision deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: reread clue, Odile conducting through logistics — workshopped: no
11 — "He moved her stool a quarter turn... and stood by it, and that was the wave." (line 29) — mechanism: substitution deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: ch04 tracker order executed — Theo's service converted to placement — workshopped: no
12 — "I did not pocket any new stubs... I want that on the record after last week." (line 31) — mechanism: on-the-record denial + sourced callback — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (requires the ch03 stub incident) — dramatic work: re-establishes the two-person ledger at the top of class — workshopped: no — **[REPAIRED, passes]**
13 — "The count came to eight," June said. "The evidence was mixed." (line 33) — mechanism: consolation-as-audit — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: reciprocates the bit with the incident's real arithmetic; June's withheld-verdict warmth — workshopped: no — **[REPAIRED, passes]**
14 — "Ben was looking from the wall clock to his phone and back, reconciling them." (line 35) — mechanism: behavioral deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (Ben's timing pathology) — dramatic work: cohort texture in one clause — workshopped: no (round 1 folded this into scene furniture; it is a deliberate item and passes)
15 — "She stood at the front pair of easels until the room ordered itself, which took under a minute and embarrassed everyone slightly." (line 37) — mechanism: authority deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Odile's economy demonstrated — workshopped: no
16 — "produced, every time, a red emergency smear" (line 41) — mechanism: self-aimed failure specificity — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: teaches the exercise through June's history per the chapter card — workshopped: no
17 — "The fire extinguisher had never minded being stared at." (line 43) — mechanism: delayed-drop understatement — source: situation+character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: lands the seating-trap realization — workshopped: no
18 — "I timed last week's poses. I'm aware that's not a personality." (line 47) — mechanism: self-aware deflation — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: cohort texture; mirrors June's "checked twice" — workshopped: no (his voice-card construction, now spent — watch holds)
19 — "offering her the most legible torso on the eastern seaboard" (line 49) — mechanism: escalation to absurd superlative — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no ("legible" is June's installer word; the diagram is Theo's pathology) — dramatic work: sets up Odile's "performing stillness" correction — workshopped: no
20 — "On. They're the only dependable edges you've got." / "That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me in this building." (lines 53–55) — mechanism: praise-as-technical-spec + deflating qualifier — source: character (both) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: flirtation under cover; plants the glasses-lean payoff — workshopped: no
21 — "a chin like a drawer left open... Closed the drawer... a menswear catalog without incident... drawn the concept of a man" (line 59) — mechanism: concrete-metaphor escalation to abstract-category punch — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: enacts the correction-as-lie thesis without captioning it — workshopped: no
22 — "The chin had told on you. The card asked you to let it." (line 69) — mechanism: diagnosis deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Odile teaching the person — workshopped: no
23 — "You are performing stillness. It is not the same as sitting. Sit." (line 69) — mechanism: insult-as-diagnosis — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: releases Theo from diagram to person; enables the true drawing — workshopped: no
24 — "Mine gave your nose two versions. I should tell you before you see it." (line 73) — mechanism: advance-warning logistics tenderness — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: reciprocal exposure — workshopped: no
25 — "Three minutes is a pop song, a subway stop, the time it takes to lose an argument." (line 77) + "She stood over it for the length of time it takes to lose an argument." (line 107) — mechanism: rule-of-three swerve with structural callback — source: character+situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the callback IS the keep decision — workshopped: no
26 — "because hardware was easy and she was a coward" (line 81) — mechanism: self-aimed deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: honest entry into the looking — workshopped: no
27 — Ugly-drawing catalog (line 89): doubled glasses / ear "drifted half an inch outboard of the head" / collar "in two minds about where the neck was" / "stretched like a reflection in a kettle" / "assembled in different rooms" — mechanism: specificity-overload escalation — source: character (crit-room cataloguing) — funniness: 2 across all entries — portable: no — dramatic work: the ugliness must be specific for the keep to mean anything — workshopped: no — **[REPAIRED, passes]**
28 — "The ear is in the right borough." (line 95) — mechanism: geographic-scale deadpan praise — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: repairs Theo's apology inside two lines; warmth floor — workshopped: no
29 — "June was on it, allegedly." (line 97) — mechanism: single-word skepticism — source: character (card-owned vocabulary) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: reciprocity of bad drawings — workshopped: no
30 — "Her nose had been drawn twice, in two locations, neither of them correct, like a rumor." (line 97) — mechanism: mapped analogy — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: sets up the knot contrast — workshopped: no
31 — "I'm sorry about your nose. The card wouldn't let me fix it." / "The card knows what it's doing." (lines 99–101) — mechanism: rule-as-agent deadpan + dramatic irony — source: character+situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: heaviest line in the chapter; innocent forward, Odile's instrument backward — workshopped: no
32 — "the paired easels filling with mutant cohort" (line 103) — mechanism: compression deadpan — source: situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: montage economy; the room's failures normalized before June's keep deviates from the norm — workshopped: no (folded into the montage in round 1; itemized here for completeness, passes)
33 — "Mara announced that Luis had made her recognizable and therefore failed the assignment; Luis said, 'I followed it. Move left, you'll see'" (line 103) — mechanism: inverted-standards complaint + sightline reveal — source: character+situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Luis's placement care move; rhymes with the chapter thesis — workshopped: no
34 — "set a granola bar on June's easel ledge without comment and was gone before it could be declined" (line 103) — mechanism: preemptive-care deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Priya's owned care move — workshopped: no
35 — "Ruth held her last drawing at arm's length, evaluated it like a proof, and filed it in her bag." (line 103) — mechanism: professional-register transplant — source: character (her copyeditor's ear, on-card "dry editorial metaphors, sparing") — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Ruth keeps hers too, without ceremony — quiet precedent for June's keep — workshopped: no (one editorial figure this appearance; at her card's cap)
36 — "which June had been in enough crit rooms to recognize as the expensive kind of nothing" (line 103) — mechanism: priced-silence paradox — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Odile's withheld praise per her card — workshopped: no
37 — "fed it their evening's failures with the cheer of people who had been promised the drawings did not count" + "kept a fifth, folding it into his coat with the smugness of a man saving a receipt" (line 105) — mechanism: communal irony + character tag — source: situation+character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: stakes the keep against the room's norm; Ben mirrors it — workshopped: no
38 — "He had not watched her decide. She was nearly sure he had not watched her decide." (line 109) — mechanism: repetition-as-self-betrayal — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: closes the chapter's verification runner (checked twice / timed twice / nearly sure twice) on the beat that matters — workshopped: no
39 — "boxing the charcoal nobody had asked him to box" (line 109) — mechanism: task-adequacy deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: ch03 callback; his turned back gives June privacy to decide — workshopped: no
40 — "and Mara's scarf still on, which had not been the plan either" (line 111) — mechanism: runner payoff, third "plan" instance, varied — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: closes scarf and plan threads in action — workshopped: no

## Chapter verdict: CLEAR

40 of 40 items at funniness 2, character/situation-sourced throughout, zero portable items, zero workshopped items. All six round-1 blocking findings are resolved in the text, not merely in the memo. Mechanisms remain varied: deadpan (several distinct species), false logic, insult-as-diagnosis, escalation, understatement, rule-of-three swerve, repetition-with-variation, specificity overload, structural callback. I hunted for new defects rather than assuming repair-round cleanliness — the three items round 1 did not itemize (#14, #32, #35) were re-pressed individually and pass on character source and non-portability; none rises to blocking, and no genuinely new defect exists to quote.

**Strongest surviving item:** #31 — *"I'm sorry about your nose. The card wouldn't let me fix it." / "The card knows what it's doing."* Funny as rule-blaming in the moment; on reread it is the chapter's best plant, because the card literally knows — Odile wrote SUBJECT, crossed it out, wrote PARTNER. No wink, full deniability.

**Weakest surviving item:** #36 — *"the expensive kind of nothing."* It passes on the crit-room anchor and Odile's withheld-praise card, but it remains the most quotation-shaped narration in the chapter, and the chapter is already carrying its full allowance of epigram-shaped narrator clauses (#8, #21's "concept of a man," #36). It survives; it should not gain siblings in revision.

## Distribution checks

- **Density:** high and continuous; right for a class set-piece at this register (Emily Henry at 60% banter density — the chapter's dialogue stays answerable and sincere; plain-speech floor holds: "I washed it," "The chin was bad," "Too late").
- **Mechanism variety:** varied. The spatial-displacement family ("eastern seaboard," "outboard," "right borough," "two locations," "assembled in different rooms," the line off the page) holds at ~6 — unchanged from round 1, still reading as controlled escalation inside one set piece, still at ceiling.
- **Sweetness:** not oversweetened. The round-1 exception (#36, the rubber-band personification) is cut; the bin beat, Theo's unwatched back, and the knot now all land unjoked, which is correct.
- **Cringe:** none. Warmth floor holds — every embarrassment repaired in-scene (ear/borough, nose/knot, Mara/move-left).
- **Tracker reconciliation:** Odile aphorism-grade lines ≈ 3 ("The page can manage without you," #22, #23) — compliant with the ch03 order. Pose/body simile: one instance (passport photo, line 49) — compliant. Mara's "Luis says" tic: one instance (line 15) — on-card. Correction-as-punchline pressure: halved per the ch04 order (#13 and #33 only). Theo service-to-looking conversion: executed (#11, #19), one residual service beat (#39) doing plot work.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. No blocking findings stand. The chapter is committable.

## WATCH NOTES (non-blocking, for the tracker)

- Spatial-displacement comedy at ceiling (~6 instances); chapters 06–07 must not inherit it as the default move for describing drawings.
- Geographic-scale gags at cap ("eastern seaboard," "right borough"); no third in adjacent chapters.
- Ben's "not a personality" construction is spent on-page; future Ben self-deprecation needs a new shape. His clock/phone "reconciling" (line 35) is the chapter's one brush of accounting language in narration — the ch02–03 paperwork-irony watch stays active; "on the record" (line 31) uses this chapter's one licensed dialogue instance.
- Epigram-shaped narrator clauses at three in a June chapter — at the stated density limit; the conservator's-patch sentence (line 61, not a comic item) brushes the same shape and argues for holding the line.
- The verification runner (checked twice / timed last week's poses / nearly sure twice) now has three instances across two characters; it is earning its keep as the book's attraction-as-evidence figure, but it is a runner now — track it with a cap before chapter 07.
- Ruth's editorial figure ("like a proof") uses her one-per-appearance allowance; her next appearance starts at zero.
