# Comedy Doctor — Chapter 21 — Round 1

audit: comedy_doctor | chapter: 21 | round: 1 | owner: claude | stance: skeptical inventory per `checks/audits/comedy_doctor.md`
note: a prior attempt hit the five-hour session limit before producing markdown; no partial output exists. This is the first usable Comedy Doctor round for Ch21.
chapter text: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md` (post Dialogue Doctor round-1 repairs; DD round 2 verified the current text byte-identical to the after-repairs snapshot)
register commitment: guide §2 — warm, precise, lightly comic, every chapter; observational and character-true, never sitcom rhythm. Target reader per the premise genre contract: 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 by every order below: Odile's shaped-line inventory is 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 is at mass limit and must not grow.

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## INVENTORY

1 — "the order told him who he was faster than a mirror could have: count first, feel later" (3) — mechanism: deadpan self-audit — source: character core with narrator-overlay garnish (nothing in Theo's card generates figures about self-knowledge; his idiom is inventories, keys, counts — the mirror comparison is the narrator being clever about him) — funniness: 1 — portable: yes (the mirror phrasing carries zero book material, and it brushes guide §6's banned epiphany-via-mirror family even as a negation) — dramatic work: plants count-first-feel-later, which the whole chapter spends (headcap thumbs, knife, drill, empty hands) — workshopped: yes (colon-snap aphorism syntax). **BLOCKING.**

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. Hunted as overlay; survives on the 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 — borderline stock phrasing, but 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 round 2 already holds this turn at mass limit; concur on comic grounds, 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 (DD order 1's replacement); comic only as family recurrence, and correctly quiet — 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. Checked for OVERSWEETENED: 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 — "not eating it would have been a performance with an audience of zero" (63) — mechanism: deflation of self-pity — source: narrator-overlay (theater-critic wit; nothing in Theo's card generates "audience of zero") — funniness: 1 (smile-shaped, stock modern-dry) — portable: yes (would fit unchanged in any contemporary novel; the only inventory item with no book material in it) — dramatic work: explains why he eats the soup instead of sulking — workshopped: yes (setup-snap syntax). **BLOCKING.**

15 — 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.

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) — 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 — repetition-with-variation done right — workshopped: no.

17 — "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.

18 — "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.

19 — "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. Hunted for composed syntax: the long conditional subject is shaped, but only this book can parse it; survives.

20 — "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 (DD order 11) — workshopped: no. DD ceiling: must not be extended; concur.

21 — "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 is Narrator/Plain-Translation remit, noted only, no order. "He finished seating it. Then he looked." (107) — timing discipline, tension not comedy. "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`)

- **Autonomous/competent hands:** 3 in-chapter instances (items 2, 10, plus the drill pocket in 15), closing to "both hands empty." Tics ch21 rows already hold hands-body-watch at 16 and order Ch22 reduction. The arc reads complete here; no Ch22 instance without transformation.
- **Straightening/squaring (Ch01 cap-watch):** 1 instance (item 13), varied — it is Odile's gesture, not Theo's. Within cap.
- **Odile quotability:** at repaired ceiling per DD round 2 and the tics row. This audit adds no Odile lines and its orders forbid adding any.
- **Drill-as-alibi:** opened and closed in-chapter (item 15). Do not reuse the drill as a comic prop downstream.
- **Counting/measurement comedy (Theo's owned idiom):** densest chapter yet (items 7, 13, 17, plus straight uses — eight/nine arithmetic, "read it four times"). Licensed in a solo-Theo chapter; must not migrate into June's Ch22 POV.
- **Legal-clerical narration (capped Ch07/08, zero since):** one brush — "remembering it was not a crime" (87). Single, situation-literal, below concern; add none in Ch22.

## DISTRIBUTION CHECKS

- **Density:** ~21 attempts across four scenes in a flagged emotional-peak chapter — the guide's lightly-comic commitment is met. The one joke-free stretch (the reading of the fear canvas, 67–71 interior) has a named reason: the painting's verdict must land unsoftened, and the drill gag correctly brackets it rather than invading it. Not DRY, not THIN.
- **Mechanism variety:** deadpan is the carrier (the guide's licensed base register), but the sub-mechanisms split: literalism (5, 6, 8), bathos/collision (4, 11), specificity/count (7, 13, 17), deflation (9, 14), prop/physical (10, 15), inversion (16), taxonomy (20), conditional aside (18), pricing/timing (12), incongruity (21). Not MONOTONOUS.
- **Source polarity:** character ≈18, situation 2 (shared credit), narrator-overlay 1 full item (14) plus 1 garnish (item 1). Correct polarity for this book; the two overlay instances are the two blocking findings — the pattern holds exactly.
- **Sweetness:** the two danger points stay sharp — soup arrives with "partly your fault" unretracted (item 11), and the boundary is priced, not blessed (item 12). One local softening found: item 14 converts a solitude beat into wit the scene didn't ask for; folded into its order. Not OVERSWEETENED at chapter level.
- **Cringe:** none. No sitcom rhythm, no banter-for-banter, nothing that embarrasses the book in front of its reader.

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## VERDICT: CLEAR — with two blocking findings; not committable until the orders below execute.

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 utility knife folding in, folding out** (49) — comic only as family recurrence, which is exactly what that beat can bear; it survives by staying quiet.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. **Item 1 (line 3)** — "and the order told him who he was faster than a mirror could have" — failure: narrator-overlay garnish on a character-true observation; workshopped colon-snap; portable; brushes the guide §6 banned epiphany-via-mirror family even as negation. Order: cut the mirror clause and keep the observation — e.g. "That was the order his hands did things in: count first, feel later." The knife-before-coat action already proves the claim; no replacement figure. The self-audit stays in cataloguer idiom or goes silent.

2. **Item 14 (line 63)** — "not eating it would have been a performance with an audience of zero" — failure: narrator-overlay, portable, workshopped; also sweetens a solitude beat. Order: replace the theatrical abstraction with Theo material (voice card: practical-to-emotional, never polished aphorisms about care) — the reasoning should be logistical, drawn from what is already in the paragraph (the soup exists; the pallet and the humidity log are waiting). "He ate the soup because it was there." standing alone is a valid execution; cutting the clause entirely is valid. Must not: coin a new figure, add an Odile line (inventory at ceiling), name the door/forgiveness thesis, or add a hand beat (motif at cap).

Constraint check on both orders: neither reintroduces Odile zingers, door/forgiveness naming, or consent-logic explanation; neither touches DD round-2 watch-items ("recognized the species," "keeping its own counsel," line 29 at mass limit, the "asking plainly" narration shape).
