# Comedy Doctor — Chapter 21 — Round 3 (current-text verification)

audit: comedy_doctor | chapter: 21 | round: 3 | owner: claude | stance: skeptical cold re-read of the current text after the Characters-Wrong round-2 repairs, the followability attribution tidy, and Dialogue Doctor round 3
chapter text: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md`
prior clean Comedy Doctor: `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.comedy_doctor.md` (round 2, CLEAR — rendered against a text that has since changed at lines 3, 5, 11, 35, 39, 43–49, 51, 59, 69, 71, 73, 75, 81, 95, 105–113)
sibling audits consulted: `chapter_21.dialogue_doctor.md` (round 3, OVERALL: CLEAN — Odile shaped-line inventory declared at capacity: 25, 29, 49, 57, 61), `chapter_21.characters_wrong.md` (round 2, WRONG-ENOUGH — five orders verified executed)
register commitment: guide §2 — warm, precise, lightly comic, every chapter; observational and character-true, never sitcom rhythm, never banter-for-banter. Target reader: 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 inherited and honored below: Odile's shaped-line inventory at ceiling (no additions, no upgrades of flat lines); the act-not-sentence clearance family ("reflex fully formed," "thumbs started the next part on their own") takes no third instance; scene 4's one-sided silence takes no caption; the mirror/audience/performance families stay dead; round 2's item-15 echo shape ("X just because opinions about X") must not recur.

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## DELTA VERIFICATION (round-2 inventory reconciled against the current text before re-auditing)

The sibling repairs cut or reworded seven of round 2's 23 items. Verified on the page and by chapter-wide sweep:

1. R2 item 1 ("count first, feel later," old ln 3) — GONE; "count first" and "mirror" grep to zero. The opening paragraph now smiles only through action (knife out before coat off) and closes on the route sentence.
2. R2 item 2 reworded: "because they didn't know what else to be" → "because there was nothing else for them to do" (5). The anthropomorphic flourish traded for flat causality; re-scored below as item 1.
3. R2 item 3 ("some dates filed themselves," old ln 11) — GONE; the surviving "he didn't have to check the date for that one" (11) is plain report, no longer a comic attempt. Adjudicated in the excluded list.
4. R2 item 9 (anger "the size he needed," old ln 35) — GONE; grep zero. Line 35 now runs straight from the fact-stack into the broken either/or question.
5. R2 item 15 ("the building didn't stop needing things just because he had opinions about needing," old ln 63) — GONE whole; grep zero. Round 2's declared weakest item and its banned echo shape are out of the book at this chapter; "Then he worked." (69) now carries the pivot bare.
6. R2 item 19 ("where a window would go if the painting were merciful," old ln 67) — GONE; "merciful" greps zero. Current: "where a window would have gone, she had put his twelve-by-sixteen." (73) — plain placement, comedy relocated to the passage's other instruments (items 15–17 below).
7. R2 item 21 recast: the present-tense general rule ("a man who paints a woman he is pretending to date... does not get to call it a study out loud") is now past-tense personal report ("he had painted a woman he was pretending to date, from memory, without telling her, and he had known better than to call it a study out loud," 81). The escalating-qualifier stack survives; the aphorism template does not. De-workshopped by the repair; re-scored below as item 20.
8. R2 item 17's middle instance reworded: "having taken the painting down in order to service its hardware" → "and the drill stayed in his pocket" (71), with a new literal setting-down at 77 that arms the 109 callback.
9. R2 item 22 ("recognized the species," old ln 103) — GONE with the scene-4 rebuild; grep zero. Its excluded neighbor "keeping its own counsel" is also gone ("counsel" greps zero).
10. Dead-family sweep on current text: mirror, audience, performance, ledger, load-bearing (all forms), species, counsel, merciful, "opinions about" — zero hits. "fuse" greps once as a substring of "refused" (81) — false positive; no fuse family exists in this chapter. "forgiving" appears once — "That isn't the same as forgiving us." (47), Theo's dialogue, installed by Characters-Wrong Order 4; round 2's zero-hit sweep targeted the ledger/forgiveness figuration in narration, and a character contesting forgiveness in plain speech is not that family returning. Not a finding.
11. Round-2 omissions surfaced by this rebuild: the unsent condition report (13) and the painted table-steadying (73) are comic attempts present in the pre-repair text that round 2 neither inventoried nor excluded. Both are inventoried this round (items 2 and 16); the omissions are logged here, not excused.

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INVENTORY:

1 — "his thumbs kept checking the headcap anyway because there was nothing else for them to do" (5) — mechanism: deadpan synecdoche; autonomous-hands instance 1 — source: character (card: performs competence under stress) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (headcap, conservator handling, this returned box) — dramatic work: shame rendered through procedure per guide §2 interiority discipline; opens the hands arc that 107 inverts and 113 closes — workshopped: no (the repair's flatter causal clause is less composed than round 2's wording, not more).

2 — "the reflex was fully formed: *All eight arrived safe. Nothing damaged.*" (13) — mechanism: deadpan specificity — the reflex composes a condition report where a feeling should go — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (eight catalogs, damage check, a recipient who routed the return around him) — dramatic work: plants the thumbs-reflex that scene 4 spends at 107; the unsent message is the sober twin the sent hedge gets priced against — workshopped: no. Missed by rounds 1–2; logged in the delta section.

3 — "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 — workshopped: no.

4 — "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 required nothing from anyone — workshopped: no.

5 — "she looked back at him with no more preparation than she gave a wall" (21) — mechanism: deadpan comparison — source: character-focalized (in her building walls get her honest professional attention; 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. Re-hunted as overlay this round; survives on the same domain grounding as rounds 1–2.

6 — "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) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: proves the errand was engineered, which is the accusation — workshopped: no.

7 — "Anyone with a library card could have read it to you." (29) — mechanism: reductio; insult-as-diagnosis — source: character (card licenses the diagnosis aimed at the person) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the acknowledgments page really has been public paper for thirty years) — dramatic work: deflection visible as deflection (guide §2) — workshopped: no. DD holds the turn at its four-sentence mass limit; concur, no growth.

8 — "No," Odile said. "It is faster than nothing." (49) — NEW — mechanism: deadpan mispricing — a concession that keeps the error: "No" gives Theo the word, the five-word clause keeps the schedule — source: character (card: declarative fragments complete in intent; full forms when cutting precisely — "It is" is the cutting register, verified against 29, 57, 61) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (hunted hardest in the chapter: the string has aphorism length, but it has no content without the clean returned catalogs standing in for a forgiveness timeline; quoted alone it does not parse) — dramatic work: the chapter's required live wrongness (Characters-Wrong Order 4) — her forgiveness-speed blind spot stated, contradicted by "That isn't the same as forgiving us." (47), and held uncorrected to her exit — workshopped: no (five speakable words over a coffee cup; and composed-for-quotation wit needs the text to endorse the shine, where this scene positions the line as wrong — the narration never ratifies her, and Theo's next utterance is the wrong ask her mispriced hope feeds). Constraint honored: this line is inside DD's declared shaped-line capacity, not an addition to it; this audit orders no growth and no siblings.

9 — the utility knife folding in, folding out (55) — 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 — workshopped: no.

10 — "There is soup upstairs. Barley. Eat before you decide anything else about yourself." (57) — mechanism: register collision plus specificity ("Barley." as one-word deadpan) — source: character (card care move: feeds without comment; template of "Eat. Then decide to be tragic.") — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: care delivered while absolution stays refused; re-checked for OVERSWEETENED against the new 45–49 exchange — passes, "partly your fault" (53) is never walked back and the soup changes lunch, not the verdict — workshopped: no.

11 — "You will be less convenient." / "Yes." (61–63) — mechanism: deadpan pricing; timing (a two-word invoice, a one-word payment) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the book's entire route/usefulness economy is required to make "convenient" land) — dramatic work: the boundary gets a cost and he accepts it on the page; the peak beat and the best joke are the same two lines — workshopped: no.

12 — clipboard hung "one degree straighter than he'd left it" (65) — mechanism: specificity overload — source: character (her exactness measured by his cataloguer's eye, the only instrument that could read one degree) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: she concedes ownership (O.M.) and reasserts authority in the same gesture — workshopped: no.

13 — "He ate the soup because it was there." (69) — mechanism: bathos; deflation by refused reasoning — source: character (dry compliance with item 10's imperative, no ceremony) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (flat only against "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself" two paragraphs up) — dramatic work: closes the soup beat without softening "partly your fault" and pivots him into work — workshopped: no. Note: with round 2's item 15 cut, the sentence now runs straight into "Then he worked." — the flatness survives bare and is stronger for losing its composed neighbor.

14 — the wire left "a half-inch low on the left" (69, 77) — mechanism: inversion of his care move (the fixer declines the fix, twice); repetition-with-variation — 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 — the residue Characters-Wrong Order 1 requires the misread to leave — workshopped: no.

15 — the drill-as-alibi run: "he had the drill and a new D-ring in his jacket pocket to prove it" / "and the drill stayed in his pocket" (71); "Then he took the drill out of his pocket, set it on the flat files" (77); "Each time he set it down like the drill." (109) — 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: competence as hiding place, then the setting-down at 77 converts the alibi into practice the 109 simile can name without a growth thesis — workshopped: no (the reworded middle instance is plainer than round 2's "in order to service its hardware" construction; the joke now lives in the pocket, not the syntax).

16 — "mid-press, steadying a table that did not appear to need steadying" (73) — NEW to inventory — mechanism: deadpan incongruity — June's painted diagnosis of competence applied where none is required, read by its subject — source: character (June's wit in paint, rendered through Theo's eye; her card's honest-warnings-dressed-as-jokes move executed in pigment) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (this canvas, this man's hands, the Week 6 fear assignment) — dramatic work: carries the portrait's verdict now that the perimeter aphorism is deleted — the indictment arrives as image, not narration over his head — workshopped: no. Present pre-repair; missed by round 2, logged in the delta section.

17 — "and she had found that, she had actually found the filled nail hole and given it four square inches" (73) — mechanism: incredulous repetition plus specificity overload — source: character (the cataloguer out-catalogued; professional disbelief at being seen by a better instrument) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (his own maintenance work painted back at him) — dramatic work: proves how exactly June saw him before he could see himself — workshopped: no.

18 — "a fond portrait of a man who did things" (75) — NEW wording — mechanism: self-deprecating deflation — three weeks of flattering misread rendered at the size it deserved — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (hunted: "a man who did things" could travel bare, but the sentence's content is his specific misread of the fear assignment, and the joke only bites because 73 has just itemized what "did things" means — jars, dowel, nail hole, keys) — dramatic work: prices the old misread so the new degraded misread ("a clean square waiting until he finished the jars and keys and came to it") can land as wishfulness the reader is trusted to distrust, per Characters-Wrong Order 1 — workshopped: no.

19 — "hung it above the flat files and walked under it forty times" (75) — mechanism: self-indicting count — source: character (he counts; the count convicts) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: three weeks of avoidance made concrete — workshopped: no.

20 — "he had painted a woman he was pretending to date, from memory, without telling her, and he had known better than to call it a study out loud" (81) — 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 scene then honors in object logic (the pencil label at 97) — workshopped: no (verified against the delta: the round-2 version's present-tense "a man who... does not get to" rule template is gone; this is report, not aphorism, and the repair moved the item away from the workshop line, not toward it).

21 — "he was not going to invent a cheekbone he'd never witnessed just to close a shape" (91) — NEW to inventory — mechanism: specificity overload; deadpan ethics — consent rendered as drawing policy — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the sight-line logic of this study, this doorway, this turned head) — dramatic work: the study's honesty enforced in craft terms; pays the guide §8 smallness test with technical truth — workshopped: no ("just to close a shape" is speakable studio idiom, not punchline syntax).

22 — "Around eight the scarf knot got its half hour" (91) — NEW to inventory — mechanism: deadpan time-accounting — tenderness given a line item in shop time — source: character (his count idiom, spent on the one detail he legitimately owns from memory) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (the slipping scarf is a planted Week 3 specific) — dramatic work: prices the memory's accuracy in labor and sets "He kept it because he had it" — workshopped: no.

23 — "his thumbs started the next part on their own, *If you'd rather not, I understand.* He sent it too. The second bubble appeared under the first before he could take it back." (107) — NEW — mechanism: cringe via prop timing; autonomous-hands instance 4, inverted — the competent hands' first on-page sabotage — source: character/situation (the hedge is his card's qualify-reflex verbatim; the bubble physics are the situation collecting) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (eleven years of reflex, one sober twin at 13, a recipient whose silence the chapter refuses to break) — dramatic work: the licensed reflex loss and its un-retractable cost (Characters-Wrong Order 2); the wince is the beat — workshopped: no. Cringe calibration checked: the embarrassment is designed, survivable, and never played for a laugh at his expense the book doesn't intend — the dark phone collects it. Not CRINGE-verdict material. Constraint honored: this is the second and last instance of the act-not-sentence reflex family per DD; no third.

24 — "he wanted to move something and had nothing in reach worth moving" (109) — mechanism: incongruity — the fixer deprived of fixable objects — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no (his coping inventory is this book's furniture) — dramatic work: renders the one-sided wait as character pressure, not clock; keeps scene 4 comic-adjacent without putting a quip near the dark phone — workshopped: no.

Considered and excluded (not comic attempts; work shown per the round-3 focus list):
- "Eight books did not fill a nine-book gap." (9) — grief arithmetic, correctly unsmiling.
- "he didn't have to check the date for that one" (11) — round 2's item 3 joke cut by sibling repair; the replacement is plain report and correctly does not smile at that date. The family is not to be re-coined.
- "a coffee in one hand, her own, no second cup" (15) — the withheld care move; the omission is the point.
- the boundary speech (59), including "If you want a person moved somewhere, ask them yourself." — checked hardest per the round-3 order. The prior draft's "you're going to ask them, out loud, with your own mouth" had punchline cadence risk; the current speech is deliberately unfluent — inventory on-ramp, stall at "I just-", physical restart off the split-tape box — and "ask them yourself" is the plain-speech floor doing boundary work, not wit. "I'm done being the route" is the paid-off return of line 3's "none of the route was him" — sanctioned figure, speakable, not a joke. No comic attempt, no workshop syntax; correctly absent from inventory.
- "a small clean rectangle of nothing that the hands in the foreground were too busy to walk toward" (73) — the fear-canvas verdict itself; deadpan surface, but filing the chapter's sharpest image as a joke would be the misclassification, not the compliment. Unsmiling by design.
- "It was a kinder reading than he trusted, which did not stop him from wanting it to be true." (75) — the degraded misread's engine: wishfulness, not wit. Hunted for a smile shape and cleared — if this sentence amused, the misread would read as charm again, which is what Characters-Wrong Order 1 removed. It doesn't; the clause is rueful and the reader is meant to wince, not grin.
- "It made the picture harder to look at. He left it that way." (89) — integrity beat, sharp not funny.
- "He kept it because he had it." (91) — flat consent logic; tautology-shaped but unsmiling, and must stay so.
- the pencil label paradox — "could read exactly what was there and no one could see it" (97) — disclosure-without-display in object logic; tenderness, not incongruity comedy.
- "He dried his hands first, rubbing paint out from under the thumbnail before he touched the screen." (103) — procedure paying off line 13; not a joke.
- "The wait was terrible in an ordinary way" (109) — plain self-report; round-2 concurrence stands.
- the dark-phone close and "both hands empty" (111–113) — the hands family's payoff, correctly unsmiling. Checked whether deleting June's reply (Characters-Wrong Order 5) created a comic hole: it did not — the scene's register is wait, the removed material ("Sunday. 9. Just coffee." / "Okay") was discipline rather than comedy in round 2's own accounting, and item 24 plus the 109 drill callback carry the scene's licensed smile at a correct distance from the silence.

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## RUNNING-GAG / TRACKER CHECKS (against `output/tics.md`, Ch17–21 rows)

- **Autonomous/competent hands:** 4 in-chapter instances (items 1, 9, the drill pocket in 15, and the thumbs at 23), closing to "both hands empty" (113). The added fourth instance (23) is the family's first loss — the hands as saboteur, not coper — which is variation, not repetition; the arc still closes in-chapter. Tics Ch21 row holds hands-body-watch at 16 and orders Ch22 reduction: the family rests in Ch22, and the 107 inversion is the transformation that licenses this last instance.
- **Drill-as-alibi:** opened, converted (77), and closed (109) in-chapter; spent. No downstream reuse as a comic prop.
- **Straightening/squaring (Ch01 cap-watch):** 1 instance (item 12), varied — Odile's gesture, measured by Theo. Within cap.
- **Odile quotability (tics: repaired / at ceiling, no new zingers):** the current shaped-line set is DD's declared capacity list (25, 29, 49, 57, 61). Line 49 is new since the tics row was written, but it entered by Characters-Wrong order as framed error, not as a zinger the text endorses; the flat functional turns (15, 19, 43) still outnumber the shaped ones. This audit adds no Odile lines and orders none; the ceiling stands.
- **Counting/measurement comedy (Theo's owned idiom):** items 6, 12, 17, 19, 22 plus straight counts (eight/nine arithmetic, twelve hours, forty times). Dense but licensed in a solo-Theo chapter; must not migrate into June's Ch22 POV.
- **Dead families:** mirror, audience/performance, ledger, species/deleted, "opinions about," merciful-window — verified zero by sweep (delta section). Round 2's item-15 echo shape is now gone from the book at this chapter entirely.
- **Ch20 spent families ("Noted", boring-parts, FEB = coat):** zero instances; resting correctly.
- **Legal-clerical narration:** round 2's single "not a crime" brush is gone with the scene-4 rebuild; zero instances on current text.

## DISTRIBUTION CHECKS

- **Density:** 24 attempts across four scenes in a flagged emotional-peak chapter — the guide's lightly-comic commitment is met. Sibling repairs cut six round-2 items, but the rebuilt inventory replaces them: two pre-existing attempts round 2 missed (items 2, 16) and four new-text items (8, 21, 22, 23). Scene split: scene 1 carries twelve, scene 2 five, scene 3 three, scene 4 three (23, 24, and the 109 callback). The joke-free stretches have named reasons: the fear-canvas verdict and degraded misread (73–75 interior) and the door/hair corrections (85–93) must land unsoftened, and the one-sided wait (111–113) takes no quip near the dark phone. Not DRY, not THIN.
- **Mechanism variety:** deadpan is the licensed base; sub-mechanisms split: literalism (4, 5, 7), bathos/flat report (3, 13), specificity/count (6, 12, 17, 19, 21, 22), pricing/timing (8, 11), prop/physical (9, 15), register collision (10), inversion (14), incongruity (16, 24), deflation (18), self-indictment (20), synecdoche (1, 2), cringe/timing (23). Not MONOTONOUS.
- **Source polarity:** character ≈22, character/situation 2 (items 15, 23), narrator-overlay 0. The strongest overlay candidates — items 5 and 16 — were re-hunted: item 5 survives on focalizer domain grounding as in rounds 1–2; item 16 is June's wit executed in paint and read by its subject, the opposite of a narrator painting wit over the scene.
- **Sweetness:** the danger points stay sharp. "Partly your fault" is never retracted (items 10, 13 re-checked); the boundary is priced, not blessed (11); the new Odile line is the opposite of sweetening — hope framed as error and left uncorrected (8); the degraded misread is flagged wishful, not endorsed (18 and the excluded 75 clause); the hedge's cost is collected by a phone that stays dark, with no comic relief placed against it (23, 24). Not OVERSWEETENED.
- **Cringe:** one designed wince (item 23), calibrated to the register and survivable within the book's warmth floor — the embarrassment is the dramatic point, not a misjudgment of the target reader. No sitcom rhythm, no banter-for-banter anywhere on current text.

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CHAPTER VERDICT: CLEAR

All round-3 focus sites adjudicated on the current text: the new Odile line (item 8) is character-sourced framed error, non-portable, not workshopped, and inside DD's declared ceiling; the revised boundary speech attempts no comedy and carries no workshop syntax ("ask them yourself" is plainer than what it replaced); the new hedge/dark-phone material contributes two clean items (23, 24) and correctly refuses a quip near the silence; the degraded fear-canvas misread keeps its comedy in the ekphrasis (16–18) and its wishfulness unsmiling. The prior mirror/audience/performance families are verified dead by sweep, along with ledger, species, merciful, and the item-15 echo shape; the one "fuse" grep hit is the substring of "refused." The rebuilt inventory (24 items) is unanimous funniness-2, character/situation-sourced, non-portable, mechanisms varied; zero narrator-overlay items; no partial, portable, or workshopped items stand.
Strongest item: **"You will be less convenient." / "Yes."** (61–63) — the chapter's peak dramatic beat and its best joke remain the same two lines.
Weakest surviving item: **"Around eight the scarf knot got its half hour"** (91) — the smallest smile in the chapter and the deepest inside the count idiom that is already at its densest; it survives on non-portability and on the dramatic work of pricing remembered tenderness in shop time, but it is the first line to cut if the count family ever needs thinning.

REVISION ORDERS:

None — no blocking findings and no verdict-level problems. The chapter is committable on comic grounds.

Standing constraints for any future touch (non-blocking, carried forward and updated): Odile's shaped-line inventory is at capacity (25, 29, 49, 57, 61) — no additions, no upgrades of flat lines, and item 8 is a ceiling, not a license for sibling aphorisms about forgiveness speed; the autonomous-hands family closed at its 107 inversion and rests in Ch22 (tics-ordered reduction); the drill is spent as a comic prop; the mirror/audience/performance/ledger/species/merciful families and the item-15 echo shape stay dead; Theo's counting comedy does not migrate into June's Ch22 POV; the act-not-sentence reflex family (13, 107) takes no third instance; the excluded lines at 75 ("kinder reading"), 91 ("He kept it because he had it"), and 97 (the label paradox) must stay unsmiling — any future pass that wittifies them converts designed wishfulness or consent logic back into charm and fails Characters-Wrong Order 1 by another road.
