Audit complete and written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_04.comedy_doctor.md`.

**Verdict: CLEAR, with three blocking findings** — all narration-level, all cut-or-swap repairs, no new jokes requested. The inventory runs 52 items; 49 score funniness-2, 49 are character- or situation-sourced, and the dialogue is fully clean: every quotable line traces to a voice-card behavior. The chapter's comedy does dramatic work at every load-bearing beat — most importantly, the comedy and the jeopardy are the same object in the pencil set piece (the funnier the story plays, the more canonical the lie becomes, paid off by Theo's receipt list).

The three blocking findings, with orders:

1. **"a flyer for a lost parakeet"** (l. 5) — portable, funniness-1. Interchangeable cozy-diner set dressing, and it exposes a pattern: the chapter's Sonia's texture (parakeet, grilled cheese, pie) is generic-American-diner while the premise binds Sonia's as Ukrainian, Veselka-adjacent. Order: replace the corkboard contents with this book's world material (pysanky-workshop flyer, block-association notice) or cut and let the booster seats carry the corner.
2. **"Because it beat sitting still,"** (l. 97) — funniness-1 by redundancy: the third narration gloss of Theo's displacement frame (after "his best method of standing still" and "what his hands did at receptions"). Order: cut the clause; the action plus "the newly famous pencil" now reads correctly unaided. Forward rule: displacement actions uncapped, glosses capped at one per chapter.
3. **"The fries arrived and ran interference"** (l. 117) — portable stock personification in nobody's idiom. Order: mark the rescue beat concretely (the spotlight visibly leaving June and Theo), not with a sports metaphor.

On the special focus areas: the **booth arithmetic** works as structural comedy — the adjacency happens by social physics, with the host getting seated by the room as the right joke on Theo (math checks: 4 + 2 + 2 = 8). The **cohort texture** is card-true across all five voices with no epigram contest, so chapter 03's failure mode does not recur. **Ruth** is rendered correctly as comedy-adjacent pressure rather than relief — exact half-pie, the unwatched pencil, one sharp line within cap — and the oversweetening candidate (Sam's "Pie first, Ruthie") clears because Ruth exits the scene still armed. Strongest item: **"'Out of, what, forty?' / 'Forty-three.'"** Weakest survivor: "the stage of pie," which passes on Theo's service-brain focalization but is the closest thing to narrator wit hovering above the table.

Tracker recommendations are in the file (new row for the 4B pencil as a relic that must never be re-produced for show; correction-as-punchline at 7 instances goes on watch for ch05+). The chapter is not committable until the three orders are resolved.
