# Comedy Doctor — Chapter 05 (Round 2: Post-Repair Verification)

Stance: skeptical professional editor. This round verifies the six blocking repairs against the current text, then re-runs the full audit on the chapter as it now stands. Verification was done against the chapter file directly, with antecedent checks against chapter 03 where the repair claims a callback.

## Repair verification (all six orders)

1. **Luis/strap quip (round-1 item 4).** REPAIRED. Current text: "He held it open with her hip for Luis, who carried both their totes after one look at her strap and a quiet, 'Weight's wrong.'" (line 13). The portable "lawsuit" hyperbole is gone; grep confirms no instance survives. The replacement is direct speech in Luis's card-owned materials vocabulary (his card explicitly owns *weight*), with his delayed/minimal-verdict quirk. The carrying-both-totes care image is intact as ordered.
2. **Gray-wool scar simile (round-1 item 6).** REPAIRED. Current text: "She tugged a corner of gray wool out of her collar as evidence." (line 15). The "the way some people show you a scar" tag is gone; grep finds no "scar" in the chapter. The proof beat stands alone, as the order specified — cut, not softened.
3. **Studio-history quip (round-1 item 10).** REPAIRED. Current text: "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" (line 23). The portable "dance school or a sweatshop" quip is gone; no "sweatshop" or "dance school" survives anywhere in the chapter. The memo's follow-up cleanup also verified: line 91 now reads "the plank-floored studio," so the chapter no longer converts room-evidence texture into canon fact. Note for the record: the replacement is not a comic item — it is smallness-test place evidence June's installer eye can read. The order explicitly permitted this outcome. The item exits the inventory rather than being rescored.
4. **Craft-false tin callback (round-1 items 13/14).** REPAIRED. Current text: "'I did not pocket any new stubs,' he said when she got there. 'I want that on the record after last week.'" / "'The count came to eight,' June said. 'The evidence was mixed.'" (lines 31–33). "Premoistened" is gone. Antecedent verified directly in chapter 03: Odile's "Count the tins back to eight and do not let him keep the stubs" (ch03 line 125), and "the count came to eight tins and two stubs in his jacket pocket, which she had watched him pocket" (ch03 line 151). June's "mixed" is precisely true to the source event — the tin count was correct *and* he pocketed two stubs and kept one with her permission — so the line is funnier with memory, which is what the order demanded. Craft-true (dry medium, no moistening anywhere).
5. **Ugly-drawing optimism tag (round-1 item 27a).** REPAIRED. Current text: "The ear had drifted half an inch outboard of the head." (line 89). No "optimism" survives; the concrete optical fact carries the joke alone, as ordered.
6. **Rubber-band personification (round-1 item 36).** REPAIRED. Current text: "The newsprint did not want to roll as tight as the first drawing had; 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." (line 109). "The band stretched to its last good idea" is gone. The beat now ends on exactly the physical facts the round-1 order specified. Counter-candidate considered: "it fought the curve" is technically a personifying verb — but it is single-verb studio idiom (paper fighting the curl), not quotation-shaped, attaches to the newsprint not the band, and round 1's own revision order named it as the correct landing. Pass.

All six repairs executed as ordered; none softened into politeness, none over-corrected into a new joke.

## Full re-audit — 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 — "carried both their totes after one look at her strap and a quiet, 'Weight's wrong.'" (line 13) — mechanism: minimal-verdict deadpan — source: character (Luis's card: weight/level diagnosis as care) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the bit is the look-then-two-word-verdict-then-carrying, which is Luis) — dramatic work: Luis's care-through-diagnosis made visible; quiet contrast to Theo's service reflex — workshopped: no
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 — "Luis says I checked twice. Keep it through the cold snap. I brought the gray one." / "She tugged a corner of gray wool out of her collar as evidence." (line 15) — mechanism: proof-presentation deadpan inside confident hosting logic — source: character (Mara, with her on-card "Luis says" tic, one instance) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: defeats June's return plan with physical evidence — workshopped: no
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: extends the scarf thread, 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-symmetrical; counted in watch notes)
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 deadpan, precision comedy — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: reread clue — Odile conducting through logistics — workshopped: no
11 — "He moved her stool a quarter turn so it faced the window light instead of the door, and stood by it, and that was the wave." (line 29) — mechanism: substitution deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: executes the ch04 order converting Theo's service choreography into looking/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 (depends entirely on ch03's tin count and stub-pocketing) — dramatic work: re-establishes the two-person ledger at the top of class; pays a planted beat — workshopped: no
13 — "The count came to eight. The evidence was mixed." (line 33) — mechanism: audit-shaped verdict withholding full acquittal — source: character (June's precision; her card's desire-as-evidence wound doing comedy duty) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: reciprocates the bit truthfully — the count *was* eight and he *did* keep a stub; she's teasing with the facts — workshopped: no
14 — "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, not described — workshopped: no
15 — "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's reader-load instruction — workshopped: no
16 — "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 the whole chapter runs on — workshopped: no
17 — "Ninety seconds is shorter than it sounds... 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 (voice-card example construction, now spent; see watch notes)
18 — "he had converted all of that into posture and was now offering her the most legible torso on the eastern seaboard" (line 49) — mechanism: escalation to absurd superlative — source: character (Theo's task-adequacy in June's optical lexicon) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: sets up Odile's "performing stillness" correction — workshopped: no (stock superlative tail survives on "legible"; at cap, see watch notes)
19 — "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 + gratitude with deflating qualifier — source: character (both) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: flirtation under cover; plants the glasses-lean payoff at lines 81 and 91 — workshopped: no
20 — "a chin like a drawer left open... Closed the drawer... a chin that could appear in a menswear catalog without incident... drawn the concept of a man" (line 59) — mechanism: concrete-metaphor escalation ending on abstract-category punch — source: character (the comedy is her named error being diagnosed) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: enacts the chapter's thesis — correction as lie — without captioning it — workshopped: no
21 — "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, not the room — workshopped: no
22 — "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 drawing that works — workshopped: no
23 — "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; Theo managing June's experience of bad news — workshopped: no
24 — "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
25 — "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 point into the looking — workshopped: no
26 — Ugly-drawing catalog (line 89): glasses "doubled at the left temple," "ear had 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, now uniformly optical) — funniness: 2 across all five entries — portable: no — dramatic work: the ugliness must be specific for the keep to mean anything — workshopped: no
27 — "The ear is in the right borough." (line 95) — mechanism: geographic-scale deadpan praise — source: character (June's owned care move wearing a joke) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: repairs Theo's apology inside two lines; warmth floor held — workshopped: no
28 — "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
29 — "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
30 — "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; joke forward, Odile's instrument backward — workshopped: no
31 — "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 owned placement care move; rhymes with the thesis — workshopped: no
32 — "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
33 — "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 (quotation-shaped; survives on the crit-room anchor)
34 — "the cohort 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 decision against the room's norm; Ben quietly mirrors it — workshopped: no
35 — "it fought the curve, and she had to... loop the rubber band from Sonia's twice to get them to hold together, two Tuesdays in one cylinder" (line 109) — mechanism: physical-resistance understatement — source: situation+character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (Sonia's band, two specific Tuesdays) — dramatic work: the keep decision made physical; the resistance is the meaning — workshopped: no
36 — "boxing the charcoal nobody had asked him to box" (line 109) — mechanism: task-adequacy deadpan — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: ch03 hoarder callback; his turned back gives June privacy to decide — workshopped: no
37 — "and Mara's scarf still on, which had not been the plan either" (line 111) — mechanism: runner payoff (third "plan" instance, varied: lines 11, 17, 111) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: closes scarf and plan threads in action, not maxim — workshopped: no

## Chapter verdict: CLEAR

37 of 37 inventory items at funniness 2, character/situation-sourced throughout, non-portable throughout, mechanisms varied (deadpan, callback, false logic, insult-as-diagnosis, escalation, understatement, repetition-with-variation, specificity overload, dramatic irony). Zero blocking findings. The chapter lost one inventory item versus round 1 (the old-building quip was converted to place evidence rather than replaced with a joke, which the round-1 order explicitly permitted); density remains high and continuous for a class set-piece, with no joke-free stretch needing a named reason.

This is not a rubber-stamp pass; per the Critique stance, the counter-candidates I pressed and cleared:
- **"it fought the curve" (line 109)** — the closest thing to residual personification at the chapter's most exposed beat. Cleared: single-verb craft idiom attached to the newsprint, not quotation-shaped, and the landing round 1's own revision order specified.
- **"evidence" doubled (lines 15 and 33)** — the repair to item 13 introduced a second "evidence" near Mara's "as evidence." Cleared as comedy: the second instance is the joke's payload, in June's register (her card's wound literally runs on treating things as evidence). Logged as a verbal-echo watch, not a defect.
- **"on the record" (line 31)** — brushes the paperwork-irony figure the ch02–03 trackers flagged. Cleared: one dialogue instance was licensed by the round-1 watch note; narration is clean of the figure.
- **Two Luis dry verdicts in one chapter ("Weight's wrong," "Move left, you'll see")** — checked against his card; both are his owned idiom (weight, placement), neither is a delayed-punchline repeat of the other. No monotony.

No new blocking defect exists. Nothing in the repaired text scores funniness 1, portable, or workshopped.

**Strongest surviving item:** #30 — "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, and the chapter's best reread plant: the card literally knows, because Odile wrote SUBJECT, crossed it out, and wrote PARTNER. No wink, full deniability.

**Weakest surviving item:** #33 — "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 at its epigram ceiling (see watch notes).

**Distribution checks:**
- Density: high and continuous; appropriate for a class set-piece in this register.
- Mechanism variety: varied. The spatial-displacement family ("eastern seaboard," ear "outboard," "right borough," "two locations," "assembled in different rooms," the line running off the page) holds at ~6 instances — unchanged by the repairs, still at ceiling, still reading as controlled escalation within one set piece rather than monotony.
- Sweetness: NOT oversweetened. The round-1 exception (the rubber-band whimsy cushioning the keep beat) is cut; the keep decision, Theo's unwatched back, and the knot beat are correctly left unjoked.
- Cringe: none. Warmth floor holds — every embarrassment is repaired in-scene (ear/borough, nose/knot, Mara/move-left).
- Tracker reconciliation: Odile aphorism-grade lines ≈ 3 — compliant with the ch03 order. Correction-shaped jokes ≈ 2 (#13, #31) — compliant with the ch04 halving order. Theo service-to-looking conversion executed (#11, #18) with one residual service beat (#36) doing plot work. Mara's "Luis says": one instance, on-card.

## REVISION ORDERS

NONE. All six round-1 blocking findings are verified repaired in the current text, with quoted evidence above; the full re-audit surfaced no new blocking item. The chapter is committable on comedy grounds.

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

- Spatial-displacement comedy holds at ceiling (~6 instances); chapters 06–07 must not inherit it as the default move for describing drawings.
- Geographic-scale gags at cap (two: "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.
- Epigram-shaped narrator clauses at the density limit for a June chapter (three: "settled the way Mara settled questions," "the concept of a man," "the expensive kind of nothing").
- "On the record" used its one licensed dialogue instance (line 31); keep narration clean of the paperwork-irony figure.
- NEW: "evidence" appears twice (line 15 narration, line 33 dialogue). Both earn their place here; do not let evidence/exhibit framing become a June-chapter verbal default — it sits close to her wound and will read as authorial thumb if it recurs.
- NEW: Luis now has two on-page material verdicts this chapter ("Weight's wrong," "Move left, you'll see"). Both on-card; cap his dry-verdict beats at two per appearance so the quirk stays a delayed pleasure rather than a dispenser.
