The completed audit is saved to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_23.comedy_doctor_round3.md`.

---

# Chapter 23 Comedy Doctor — Round 3 — Finished Together / Labels

Read cold as the reading guide's target reader (§2: warm, precise, lightly comic; Emily Henry at ~60% banter with sincere answers permitted; O'Leary found-family warmth; *Days at the Morisaki Bookshop* / *Before the Coffee Gets Cold* quiet as the floor) — the reader who wants comedy generated by these people's specific damage, not narrator wit painted over the scene. Round 3 exists for one job: confirm the **Positive Prose repairs** (`chapter_23.positive_prose.md`, verified INHABITED; `chapter_23.dialogue_doctor` round 4, verified CLEAN) — which rewrote four dialogue/dialogue-adjacent sites *after* the prior clean comedy pass (`chapter_23.comedy_doctor_round2.md`, CLEAR) — did not (a) make the chapter dry, (b) flatten a working comic item, (c) introduce narrator-overlay wit, or (d) soften the costly New York path / Priya–Ben slower choice / portrait consent. Chapter-card constraints re-applied: late-book payoff, not a banter showcase; comedy must arise from Theo's over-competent restraint, Odile's brutal economy, Priya/Ben logistics under pressure, June's exactness; `outcome rules: no character names the two-panel metaphor aloud`. Line numbers cite `output/chapters/chapter_23.md`.

The four repaired sites are all excluded-as-non-comic lines in the round-2 inventory (L85, L87, L119) or the non-comic surround of one surviving comic item (L89). The single comic item inside a repaired paragraph — the sonogram simile (item 9, L89) — survives intact. No repair added, killed, or altered a comic item; the inventory is the round-2 inventory of 16, re-located and re-judged against the current text, and every item holds. Line numbers did not shift (all four edits are in-place substitutions inside existing paragraphs), so round-2 citations remain exact.

Spent-family greps run clean on the current text: `the math` (spoken) 0, `just coffee` 0, `Noted` 0, `whole of` 0, `March is a long way` 0, `a lie with` 0. Conduct-grade praise 0 — June's "Good. It should." (L89) affirms the justice of Asha's gladness ("It should [land on her as the best thing]"), not anyone's conduct; her "Closer / That one / Cut it" grade the label *copy*, an artifact, not Theo (Ch22 froze the conduct-grade family at 2 — honored). Recognitional `the way [X]` similes 0 (only literal "a third of the way down" L7, "on the way out" L47). Deadpan `, which` comic captions 0 — three functional narrator `which` survive (L27, L121, L169) plus two functional dialogue `which` (L81), none a comic caption. Logistics-joke comedy is card-sanctioned (Priya/Ben under pressure) and mechanism-varied, not repetition-as-tic.

## POSITIVE-PROSE REPAIR VERIFICATION (four sites)

All four repairs are present in the current text and hold. None flattens a comic item, introduces overlay wit, thins density, or softens a protected beat; three of the four in fact keep the costly beats *sharper* than the lines they replaced.

1. **Theo L85 — "March is a long way to carry January" → concrete Kessler timing.** Current: *"That's two months before Kessler," he said. "That's all I get to say about it. I know it doesn't solve anything."* The excised line was round-2 EXCLUDED as non-comic ("tender; the dialogue-doctor's fake-sharp call, not a joke"); its removal kills no comedy. The replacement is Theo's plain restrained speech keyed to the L81 March timeline, atop the four withheld fixes he inventories at L83 — restraint, not a comic beat, and no overlay wit. **Effect on the protected NY path: sharpens it** (the tender consolation is gone; "I know it doesn't solve anything" leaves June's precarity uncushioned). **Verified.**

2. **June L87 — tidy self-diagnosis cut.** Current: *"It doesn't solve it," she said. Almost a smile. "The helpful version costs me the room."* Round 2 EXCLUDED this line as "thesis kept deliberately sharp (protects the costly path)"; cutting the trailing "I only just learned to tell them apart" leaves it barer and no less costly. It did **not** convert into a comic beat — see the counter-candidate analysis in EXCLUDED. **Protected NY path: intact/sharper** (June's help-refusal still costs her Dana's room). **Verified.**

3. **June L89 — balanced glad/not-go maxim → brush action + "Good. It should."** Current: *She scraped the brush on the palette, too hard. "Good. It should." … "I'm not sorry I'm not going. I wanted to say that out loud in a room instead of just deciding it in my kitchen."* The comic item in this paragraph — "She sent me a photo of the studio-access form like it was a sonogram" (item 9) — is **untouched and still lands** before the scrape. The repair swapped a pre-resolved both-sides formula for a stress-action (June's canonical brush-busywork) plus a clipped self-command; that is emotional discipline, not comedy, and adds no overlay wit. **Protected NY path: sharper** (the too-hard scrape keeps the non-envy unresolved; "I'm not sorry I'm not going" keeps the choice hers). **Verified.**

4. **L119 — generic posture → concrete optics + held hands.** Current: *They stood back from it together for the first time all afternoon. On his side the track-light bar stopped at the strip of primer. On hers the doorway held its dark. He kept his hands at his sides and looked from the leaning corner to the place where her room began.* Neither the old nor the new line is comic; the replacement is inhabited two-vantage description plus Theo's held (un-fixing) hands — restraint rendered concretely, no wit-layer. **Verified.**

**Dryness check:** the repairs removed zero comic items; density is unchanged from round 2 (16 items). Scene 04 (phone/Dana/Asha) was never comedy-heavy — its one comic beat (item 9) survives — so barering L85/L87/L89 does not strand it dry; it keeps its costly weight, which is correct for a protected beat. Not DRY.

## INVENTORY

1 — "Nobody counts folding chairs twice for a room that seats eighteen unless he's counting them to keep from standing in the middle of the floor rehearsing four o'clock" (L3) — mechanism: deadpan self-diagnosis via displacement — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (folding chairs / seats eighteen / four o'clock = this room, June's arrival) — dramatic work: opens on his nerves and the withheld-usefulness engine in beat one — workshopped: no (strongest workshop-*candidate* in narration: the "Nobody does X unless Y" shape looks composed; passes because it reports his actual over-counting and names the real displacement)

2 — "He had arranged a room around a woman who wasn't in it, out of her habits, for her comfort, without being asked… Carrying it back would be its own kind of arranging" (L3) — mechanism: self-catching + recursive deflation (undoing care is also care) — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: names the restraint problem before June arrives — workshopped: no

3 — "a mug in one hand she didn't offer to split and a manila folder in the other she did" (L11) — mechanism: withhold/offer antithesis — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (Odile-specific) — dramatic work: sets her terms on entrance (shares business, not warmth) — workshopped: no (reports a real two-handed gesture, not a composed spoken zinger)

4 — "You met your feelings and issued a form." (L19) — mechanism: insult-as-diagnosis / register collision (feeling → bureaucracy) — source: character (Odile, the sole style-bible-licensed high-density voice) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (names the clipboard he just built and his exact pathology) — dramatic work: diagnoses Theo's whole arc in seven words; targets the act, not his phrasing (clears §2 dialogue-diagnosis) — workshopped: no — **STRONGEST ITEM**

5 — "and it's blank, and it stays blank… I'm not moving it for a viewing or a crate or a person who needs walking somewhere" (L21) — mechanism: self-aware reduction (his old usefulness-role named as "a person who needs walking somewhere") — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (his assistant-trap; the chapter's boundary follow-through) — dramatic work: Theo's life-boundary follow-through, dry rather than sentimental — workshopped: no

6 — "she folded it into thirds and put it in the cardigan pocket, took the top chair off his stack, carried it to the flat files, and set it down where she meant to sit and watch" (L23) — mechanism: deadpan assent-by-appropriation (she accepts his boundary by commandeering his logistics) — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: renders her yes and the role-reversal (she now watches him work, on his chair) without a line — workshopped: no

7 — "twice she said 'Mine' before he'd decided whether to cross, not sharp about it… Twice he took his hand back to his own eight inches" (L63) — mechanism: repetition-with-variation (two claims + two takebacks) — source: character (June/Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (their seam, their collaboration) — dramatic work: keeps the territory-claim loving, not combative — workshopped: no

8 — "January's a lot of lentils and walking fast to stay warm. But there's a key with a date on it now. That's a real thing to be broke toward." (L81) — mechanism: concrete specificity + reframe ("broke toward") — source: character (June's dry economy) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: keeps the New York path costly while dignifying the deadline — workshopped: no

9 — "She sent me a photo of the studio-access form like it was a sonogram." (L89) — mechanism: incongruity simile (bureaucratic form = pregnancy announcement) — source: character (June painter-eye) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (anchored to Asha's form and June's not-going) — dramatic work: renders Asha's joy and June's un-bitter gladness; the path stays chosen, not lost — workshopped: no — *repair-adjacent (L89): survives untouched; the "Good. It should." repair follows it and does not flatten the landing*

10 — "Priya had two coffees, one of which she set down in front of June before she'd asked. She looked at what she'd done and said, 'Do you want that?'" (L93) — mechanism: self-catching care reflex (control, then correction) — source: character (Priya) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (her "care becomes control when she does not ask first" arc) — dramatic work: Priya's arc in a gesture; mirrors the chapter's ask-first/consent theme — workshopped: no

11 — "I made a spreadsheet with a column for whether we were ready, and I couldn't fill the column in. The blank part just sat there." (L101) — mechanism: deadpan understatement (the unfillable readiness-column) — source: character (Ben) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (his spreadsheet, his readiness) — dramatic work: names why the working number scared him; the empty column speaks — workshopped: no

12 — "I wanted the lease to make me not scared, and it turns out a lease can't do that. Who knew. Everyone. Everyone knew that." (L105) — mechanism: self-answer deflation — source: character (Ben) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (attached to the lease / eleven-minutes stakes) — dramatic work: self-deprecation that does NOT cancel "I'm scared it's the wrong call" one line up — workshopped: no

13 — "the lender owning the loan on a form her nephew had made her that morning… She hung the clipboard back one degree straighter than he'd left it" (L115) — mechanism: reversal/payoff + precise over-correction as signature — source: character/situation (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (pays the L19 jab; the one-degree straighten is the book's Odile/Theo motif) — dramatic work: Odile submits to his system while keeping the last correction — workshopped: no

14 — "It's a wall text. It's explaining the joke before anyone tells it." (L131) — mechanism: meta-deflation (over-explanatory label = a joke pre-told) — source: character (June's editorial-care move) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (guarded in-scene: "She wasn't grading him. She was doing to the card what she'd done to the doorway"; critiques the *work*, not his speech — clears §2) — dramatic work: enacts the no-caption thesis; June teaching Theo restraint — workshopped: no — **WEAKEST SURVIVING** (most quotable / portability-adjacent; see verdict)

15 — "And 'views' is a tour bus." (L135) — mechanism: compression / incongruity (a word reduced to a tour-bus register) — source: character (June diction-precision) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (work-critique of the actual copy) — dramatic work: strips the label toward "finished together" — workshopped: no

16 — "Someone's going to tell you it's crooked and offer to fix it… tell them it's supposed to. Then come find me. I'll be at the coffee pretending I'm not watching the door." (L175) — mechanism: predicted-reflex setup + self-aware admission of wanting — source: character (June's wants-to-be-seen-and-not-caught contradiction) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the crooked corner is this piece; the wound is June's) — dramatic work: June choosing to be caught wanting = her arc's payoff; the crooked corner affirmed, not softened — workshopped: no

## EXCLUDED as non-comic (repair sites first, then tension / thesis / craft / restraint)

The four repaired lines are dispositioned here as the round-3 counter-candidates — the honest hunt is whether a repair *created* a new dry comic beat that would sweeten a protected beat, or *killed* one that would leave the scene dry. Neither occurred.

- **L85 (repaired) — "That's two months before Kessler… I know it doesn't solve anything."** Closest of the four to comedy (Theo rationing himself to one sentence, "That's all I get to say about it," is the over-competent-restraint engine). Excluded because the register is painful restraint, not amusement — he is withholding four fixes for the woman he loves; a landed joke here would sweeten the costly beat, and the repair correctly declines it. No overlay wit.
- **L87 (repaired) — "Almost a smile. 'The helpful version costs me the room.'"** The strongest "did a repair create a dry comic beat?" candidate: barer than round 2 and now tagged with an expression of near-amusement. Excluded because the mechanism is a costly-trade acknowledgment (accepting Theo's help = losing Dana's room / her independence), not a joke mechanism; "*Almost* a smile" marks that it costs more than it amuses. It stays what round 2 called it — thesis that protects the costly path — only barer. Non-comic; not a new beat.
- **L89 (repaired) — "She scraped the brush on the palette, too hard. 'Good. It should.'"** Excluded: a stress-action (June's canonical brush-busywork) plus a self-directed command affirming the justice of Asha's gladness. Adjacent to the frozen conduct-grade family by the bare word "Good," but it grades the world's fairness, not a person's conduct — not the spent family, and not comedy.
- **L119 (repaired) — "the track-light bar stopped at the strip of primer… He kept his hands at his sides."** Excluded: inhabited two-vantage optics + held-hands restraint. No comic attempt in either the old or new line; no overlay wit added.
- "The form was ugly and useful and it existed because in November he had carried nine catalogs out of this building on no signature but his own good judgment" (L5) — rueful self-reckoning / Ch17-rupture callback; arc, not joke.
- "He looked at the water, the light, the tape, and cut the rest." (L31) — Theo restraint as action.
- "foreshortened so hard the far end fell off a cliff" (L35) — strongest "is-this-narrator-wit?" *candidate* in description; excluded as craft — it renders the actual extreme foreshortening of June's threshold study, an optical fact of her composition, not painted-on wit.
- "not looking would have been another kind of dishonesty" (L39) — restraint/honesty, not a beat.
- "Line them up and you get a third one neither of us saw." (L57) — aesthetic law in June's register; craft, and does not name the two-panel metaphor (respects the outcome rule).
- "He'd have handed it to her. He kept his grip on his own brush and let her reach." (L63) — withheld-care restraint, dramatic not comic.
- the pentimento passage / "He was doing it on purpose." (L65) and "it wasn't a confession, it was only drawing" (L73) — the underpainting craft-thesis, dry-tinted but not beats.
- "four were doors he could hold — a framer… a crate he could drive to Ridgewood himself" (L83) — withheld-help inventory (restraint), controlled per Theo's voice card, not catalog prose.
- "I'm scared it's the wrong call. That's the real thing under the eleven minutes." (L105) — plain fear; protects the Priya/Ben sincerity.
- "I want to know what you want, not what the rent wants… That's my condition. Not the apartment. That." (L109) — sincere plain-speech thesis (protects the slower choice); "left it crooked" one line up is an arc-gesture (release), thematic not comic.
- "Two underpaintings of one room, finished together." (L143) — the emotional payoff artifact. "I want a backup." (L149) / "let them be two cards" (L151) — restraint payoffs.
- the study-faced-in passage / "June would turn it tonight or she wouldn't." (L165) — portrait consent, pure restraint, carries no joke. Untouched by the repairs.
- "taking the dirty water home with the rest" (L167) — plain habit.

## DISTRIBUTION FINDINGS

**Density — not DRY, not THIN.** 16 comic beats across a ~2,900-word chapter, subordinate to the joint-piece / label / tape / cohort beats, exactly as the chapter card mandates (payoff, not banter showcase). All four card-named sources deliver: Theo's over-competent restraint (1, 2, 5), Odile's brutal economy (3, 4, 6, 13), Priya/Ben logistics under pressure (10, 11, 12), June's exactness (8, 9, 14, 15, 16). The Positive Prose repairs removed **zero** comic items, so the density and distribution are identical to the round-2 CLEAR.

**Source split — narrator-overlay = 0.** 16/16 character- or situation-sourced. Each of the four repairs replaced its site with character speech or character action (Theo's plain interval, June's brush-scrape, Theo's held hands), introducing no wit-layer. This is the property round 2 fought for (old overlay half ~9 items) and it holds.

**Mechanism variety — not MONOTONOUS.** Twelve-plus distinct mechanisms across 16 items; none recurs more than twice; Odile's four beats use four different mechanisms (antithesis L11, diagnosis L19, appropriation L23, reversal L115). Unchanged by the repairs.

**Sweetness — NOT OVERSWEETENED (three protected beats re-checked against the repaired text).**
- *New York path stays costly — and the repairs sharpen it.* L81 "lentils and walking fast to stay warm" / "broke toward"; L85 (repaired) "I know it doesn't solve anything" over the withheld fixes at L83; L87 (repaired) "The helpful version costs me the room"; L89 (repaired) "I'm not sorry I'm not going" over a too-hard scrape. The excised tender line (old L85) and the excised both-sides maxim (old L89) were the two lines closest to sweetening; both are gone.
- *Priya/Ben's slower choice stays sincere.* L105 "I'm scared it's the wrong call. That's the real thing under the eleven minutes"; L109 "That's my condition. Not the apartment. That." Untouched by the repairs; the fear stays unretracted (Ben's L105 self-answer deflation follows the plain fear, does not replace it).
- *Portrait consent carries no joke.* L165 "June would turn it tonight or she wouldn't" — pure restraint, untouched.

**Cringe — none for this reader. Warmth floor — holds.** No comedy lands at a character's unrepaired expense; the close (L175) is warm. The `outcome rule` holds: no comic item names the two-panel metaphor aloud — June actively *strips* the naming from the label (L131 "Cut it," L135 "'views' is a tour bus").

**`, which` survivors (round-1 mandate).** Zero comic captions. Three functional narrator `which` (L27 characterizing inference tied to June's exit-before-watched wound — the one survivor with a faint dry gloss, WATCH; L121 setup-transition ramping into the label comedy; L169 Theo's scene-logistics) and two functional dialogue `which` (L81) — none introduced or altered by the repairs.

**Non-blocking WATCH notes (tracker only; none a comic-blocking finding):**
- *Calculation figure ×2:* narration "doing arithmetic" (L45) + "She did the arithmetic" (L81) — neither spoken `the math` (Ch20 ceiling honored) nor debt-figure narration (Ch18/19 retired family honored); two "arithmetic" in one chapter is a soft echo adjacent to the retired family. Unchanged from round 2; hold to one or vary in Ch24.
- *Bare "Good" adjacency:* June's "Good. It should." (L89) sits near the Ch22-frozen conduct-grade family by the word "Good" only; it is world-affirmation, not a conduct grade — do not let a future "Good" re-open the graded-conduct family.
- *L27 `which`-gloss:* the last drop from the repaired caption nozzle; functional characterization, non-portable — seed no new ones.
- *Theo cold-open template (L3):* re-hits the Ch10-flagged solitary-maintenance-plus-self-audit opening; character-sourced and lands, acceptable as a late-book bookend of Ch01, noted for consistency.

## CHAPTER VERDICT: CLEAR

The Positive Prose repairs are comedy-safe. Comedy still lands in register: 16/16 comic items funniness-2 (scored to this book's quiet, lightly-comic floor, not generic workshop laughs), 16/16 character/situation-sourced, 16/16 non-portable, 0 workshopped, 0 narrator-overlay, mechanisms varied. The four repairs touched only non-comic thesis/restraint lines (L85, L87, L119) and the non-comic surround of one surviving comic item (L89); they killed no comedy, added no overlay/portable/workshopped wit, left density unchanged, and *sharpened* rather than softened the costly New York path. The Priya/Ben slower choice and the portrait consent were untouched and remain sincere and joke-free.

- **Strongest surviving:** L19 "You met your feelings and issued a form." — character-sourced, non-portable, un-workshopped, doing the chapter's central diagnostic work in seven words, legal under §2 (targets the act, not the sentence). Unchanged by the repairs.
- **Weakest surviving:** L131 "It's explaining the joke before anyone tells it." — clears at funniness-2 but is the chapter's most quotable, portability-adjacent line. It passes only because it is June-generated (her sanctioned precise-work-critique care move), guarded in-scene ("She wasn't grading him. She was doing to the card what she'd done to the doorway"), and enacts the book's no-caption thesis. Unchanged by the repairs; non-blocking. If a later pass wants to de-risk the aphoristic shape, ground it harder to the specific clause on the card rather than cutting a thesis beat.

Per-criterion counter-candidates scrutinized (stance requirement): strongest *workshop*-candidate = L3 "Nobody counts folding chairs twice… unless…" (composed "Nobody does X unless Y" shape) — passes on real behavior + real displacement; strongest *portable*-candidate = L131 (above); strongest *new-dry-beat-from-a-repair* candidate = L87 "Almost a smile. 'The helpful version costs me the room.'" — judged costly-trade thesis, not a comic beat; residual *narrator-overlay* = L27 "a performance she wasn't giving today" — functional characterization, non-portable, flagged WATCH.

## REVISION ORDERS

**None blocking. The chapter is committable on comedy.**

No item is scored funniness-1, portable:yes, or workshopped:yes, and no verdict-level problem stands (density right, sweetness intact and if anything sharper across all three protected beats, mechanisms varied, warmth floor held, outcome rule honored). Each of the four Positive Prose repairs is verified comedy-safe: it flattened no working comic item, introduced no narrator-overlay wit, did not dry the chapter, and did not soften the costly New York path (L85/L87/L89 sharpen it), the Priya–Ben slower choice (untouched), or the portrait consent (untouched).

The WATCH items above (arithmetic ×2, the bare-"Good" adjacency, the L27 `which`-gloss, the L3 cold-open reuse) are non-blocking tracker notes, not revision orders; they exist so the repaired families stay repaired in Ch24.
