# Audit: Comedy Doctor — Chapter 24: First Snow

id: comedy_doctor | chapter: 24 | owner: claude | tier: risk
trigger: flag:comic-register (reading-guide-mandated => every-chapter)
target reader: reader of warm, precise, lightly-comic literary romance (Beth O'Leary warmth; Emily Henry at ~60% banter; *Morisaki Bookshop* quiet). Wants dry recognition and warmth, not a joke-a-line; "quiet interiority over quippiness." A line that would amuse a generic workshop and bore that reader fails.

Read once as the target reader. Full comic inventory below (failed/partial attempts are inventory, not omissions). Grep-verified before scoring: `which` captions = 0; `whole` = 1 literal ("whole week," l. 91), not the banned comic template; the frozen Ch22 deflecting-tag family ("for no defensible reason," "which was not a plan," "as suspected," "correct level") = 0; economy/sentence-quality jokes ("four words," "the short version," "let it land," "carry it") = 0; "two words at an urn" (l. 57) and "two words with nothing after them" (l. 131) are grave scale-sizing beats, not comic items (Dialogue Doctor round 2 already cleared them). The dialogue-diagnosis repairs at ll. 29/45 hold: neither site rates a line's craft.

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## INVENTORY

1 — "She left it a tower and counted that, privately, as growth." (l. 3) — mechanism: deflation / self-aware undercut — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: opens June's self-management arc; sets the "not composing the room" throughline paid off at l. 95 — workshopped: no
2 — "the radiator sounded like it was trying to leave the building" (l. 7) — mechanism: personification / incongruity — source: character (Sam) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (Sam-anchored + breaks June's dread; note the image itself is sentence-level transferable — watch) — dramatic work: breaks June's pre-loaded weekend dread; establishes the warmth floor — workshopped: no
3 — "the dread turned out to be the kind you only get to have in advance" (l. 7) — mechanism: reframe / deflation — source: character (June interiority) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: resolves the "apartment's worth of dread" setup — workshopped: no (aphoristic shape; watch)
4 — "in a font he'd visibly agonized over" (l. 9) — mechanism: incongruity / character-detail — source: character (Ben) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Ben's over-care; sets up the flyer's before/after — workshopped: no
5 — "It had the decency to show the before, so that the after could be the surprise." (l. 9) — mechanism: personification-caption / reframe — source: narrator-overlay — funniness: 1 — portable: yes — dramatic work: mirrors the underpainting before/after — workshopped: yes → BLOCKING
6 — "Sam's big loose canvas that was either a dog or a sofa and refused to commit" (l. 11) — mechanism: incongruity + personification — source: character (Sam) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: characterizes Sam's loose hand; sets the running gag — workshopped: no [running-gag instance 1 of 2]
7 — "Luis's three small studies hung so precisely you could have leveled a shelf against them" (l. 11) — mechanism: hyperbole (precision) — source: character (Luis) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: characterizes Luis, the level/shim man — workshopped: no (reframe-cluster member; watch)
8 — "making himself necessary so quietly it read as standing still" (l. 11) — mechanism: paradox / incongruity — source: narrator-overlay (about Theo) — funniness: 1 — portable: yes — dramatic work: characterizes Theo's self-effacement — workshopped: yes → BLOCKING
9 — "standing next to your own picture while a room decides about it is a way to make everyone in it lie to you" (l. 17) — mechanism: composed aphorism / reframe — source: narrator-overlay — funniness: 1 — portable: yes — dramatic work: motivates June staying at the urn — workshopped: yes → BLOCKING
10 — "A couple of the others clocked the seam, decided it was a technique, and moved on. Fine." (l. 25) — mechanism: dry deflation (the philistine misread) — source: situation / character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: sorts the room; protects the picture's real readers — workshopped: no
11 — "'It's meant to lean,' Theo said, and left it there. ... Now he went to top off a water jar that didn't need it." (ll. 27–29) — mechanism: register collision (installer reflex vs. artist intent) + displacement activity — source: character (Sam + Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: MAJOR — shows Theo dropping the sermon he'd have delivered a month ago (his whole arc, enacted not stated) — workshopped: no
12 — "said 'Huh' in the tone of a man filing something away" (l. 31) — mechanism: deadpan characterization — source: character (Sam) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Sam's move-on grace, paid off in the next line — workshopped: no
13 — "Mara would bring food to a house fire if the crew looked underfed" (l. 35) — mechanism: hyperbole — source: character (Mara) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (content Mara-specific; the "would [care] at [disaster] if…" template is transferable — watch) — dramatic work: defines Mara's care move on entrance — workshopped: no
14 — "'I washed it,' June said ... 'Twice. Once for no reason. Here.'" (ll. 37–39) — mechanism: dry over-precision — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: June's exposed care carried by the returned dish — workshopped: no
15 — "a dish that comes back full is a dish that gets to come back" (l. 39) — mechanism: care-logic symmetry — source: character (Mara) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: dish-as-tether motif (planted Ch18) — workshopped: no (maxim symmetry; watch)
16 — "Four inches toward the easels ... 'There,' Luis said." + Mara declining the warm gloss (ll. 41–43) — mechanism: dry precision (Luis) + arc-payoff (Mara withholding her translation) — source: character (Luis / Mara) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: MAJOR — cohort payoff (Mara's arc; Luis's visibility care) without a slogan — workshopped: no
17 — "'You want that,' she said. June took it. It had too much milk." (l. 45) — mechanism: character comedy (manage-not-ask) + dry undercut — source: character (Priya / June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Priya's arc (learning to ask); June accepts imperfect care — workshopped: no
18 — "left it a half-degree off level on purpose, and walked away. For Ben, practically skywriting." (l. 47) — mechanism: comic understatement / reframe-tag — source: character (Ben) via narration — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Ben's growth (leaving a thing imperfect) — workshopped: no (tag-shape; reframe-cluster member; watch)
19 — "Ruth nodded like a receipt" (l. 57) — mechanism: composed simile (editorial) — source: character (Ruth) via narration — funniness: 1 — portable: yes — dramatic work: Ruth files-and-keeps — workshopped: yes → BLOCKING
20 — "'I had the paragraph loaded.' ... 'carrying paragraphs around in my pocket all night and not saying them. It's exhausting. I don't know how you've done it your entire life.'" (l. 73) — mechanism: character self-image (Theo's over-explaining named as a body-load) — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: makes Theo's restraint arc cost something out loud — workshopped: no
21 — "'Practice,' June said. 'And I say mine to myself later. Worse for you, better for the party.'" (l. 75) — mechanism: dry deflection-by-joke — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: June's compression against Theo's expansion; couple texture — workshopped: no
22 — "'Bring it Tuesday,' she said, and remembered there were no more Tuesdays. ... 'That's why dishes exist.'" (l. 79) — mechanism: warm self-correction + care-maxim — source: character (Mara) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: dish-tether; the elegiac note that the eight Tuesdays are ending — workshopped: no
23 — "neither of them looking eleven minutes apart tonight" (l. 81) — mechanism: callback / understatement — source: character (Priya / Ben) — funniness: 2 — portable: no (prior-chapter callback) — dramatic work: cohort couple payoff — workshopped: no
24 — "He'd held the door for the collectors by keeping it shut." (l. 83) — mechanism: paradox / incongruity — source: character (Theo) + situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Theo's logistical control; gentle class-comedy on the collectors — workshopped: no (composed paradox; watch)
25 — "Sam's dog-or-sofa, back whenever Sam surfaced" (l. 85) — mechanism: repetition-with-variation (running gag) — source: character (Sam) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: cohort texture + check-out logistics — workshopped: no [running-gag instance 2 of 2; varied by "whenever Sam surfaced"]
26 — "Not-looking, if she did it to prove a point, was its own composed arc of cups, another performance" (l. 95) — mechanism: callback (to l. 3) — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: closes the tower/arc bit; June refuses performance at the portrait — workshopped: no
27 — "'Sign yourself out too,' she said. 'You're work that left the building. I keep a record.'" (l. 113) — mechanism: deadpan / brutal economy — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: sets up the ledger reveal; care disguised as logistics — workshopped: no
28 — "'He was handy. He's my--' She stopped ... 'He was handy,' she said again." (l. 121) — mechanism: deadpan understatement + withheld reveal — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: reveal texture; guards the nephew secret even with the door shut — workshopped: no
29 — "'I ran a class. ... I'm retiring, not dead.'" (l. 125) — mechanism: deadpan / brutal economy — source: character (Odile) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: carries THE reveal un-sentimentalized — workshopped: no
30 — "'Give them the drawings and the wine and none of my time.'" + "went up to be retired at some collectors" (l. 137) — mechanism: deadpan (Odile) + dry narration — source: character (Odile / June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: keeps the finger-on-the-drawer beat from going soft — workshopped: no
31 — "'Keep it. Paint another one where I'm facing the right way and I'll think about it.'" (l. 143) — mechanism: deflection-by-joke — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: June accepts/deflects the portrait's weight — workshopped: no
32 — "she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying" (l. 145) — mechanism: dry undercut of a large feeling — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: renders love without sentiment (interiority discipline) — workshopped: no (reframe-tag family; watch)
33 — "the fat slow kind that can't yet decide if it means it" (l. 149) — mechanism: personification (lyric) — source: narrator-overlay (June painter-eye) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: renders first snow; the clock-motif image; does NOT gag or undercut the beat — workshopped: no
34 — "a February problem, a Kessler-in-March problem, an eight-hundred-dollars-by-Thursday problem" (l. 155) — mechanism: escalating tricolon / reframe — source: character (June money-cognition) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: keeps the ending money-real, refuses sentiment — workshopped: no (composed tricolon; watch)
35 — "'I come back and hand two rich people some drawings. That's it. I'm not carrying anything.'" (l. 157) — mechanism: self-correction + deflation (of the collectors and his own errand) — source: character (Theo) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Theo catching his own care-reflex mid-sentence (arc) — workshopped: no
36 — "come January the water would have to make it all the way to Ridgewood and she was in training" (l. 155) — mechanism: dry literalization — source: character (June) — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: makes June's material future concrete — workshopped: no

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## DISTRIBUTION CHECKS (work shown)

**Density vs. register — PASS.** ~36 comic items across ~2,600 words for a "lightly comic" book: rich but never a joke-a-line. Not DRY, not THIN. The two beats the guide wants sharp are protected: the Ruth private confession (ll. 51–57, joke-free above the one dry simile flagged in F4) and the Odile reveal (ll. 113–131). The portrait scene (ll. 89–105) is correctly comedy-free.

**Sweetness — PASS (not OVERSWEETENED).** No comedy softens a beat the book wants sharp. The Odile reveal carries wit ("I'm retiring, not dead," l. 125) but that is Odile's own register, and June holds her *wrong* without a joke ("It wasn't yours to run," l. 129) → "No … It wasn't." (l. 131), with no apology and the page torn out. The cohort payoffs stay object-specific (the dish, the flyer, the placement) and never resolve into a forgiveness speech or a found-family slogan — the card's named risk. Strongest counter-candidate I considered: "That's why dishes exist" (l. 22 above) — survives; it is a specific care-object line, not an absolution motto. The ending resists BOTH oversweetening and joke-undercutting: the snow stays lyric (item 33), then the last line is money ("eight hundred dollars due Thursday, and she went"), and the kiss ("sugar and cold") is not tagged with a gag.

**Cringe — PASS.** The art-world comedy ("hand two rich people some drawings," "held the door … by keeping it shut," "to be retired at some collectors") is gentle, aimed at the class dynamic, never contemptuous — clears the guide's "art-world satire as cruelty" ban. No item misjudges the target reader.

**Mechanism variety — PASS with WATCH.** Across the chapter the mechanisms vary well: register collision (11), brutal-economy deadpan (27–30), displacement (11; and the water jar l. 29/61), dry precision (14, 16), care-maxim (15, 22), personification (2, 6, 33), running-gag repetition (25), escalating tricolon (34), self-correction (35). **But** one mechanism — the small-thing-plus-dry-caption reframe — carries the opening third almost alone and skews narrator-overlay: ll. 3, 7, 9, 11 (×2), 17, 35, 47. Eight reframe-tags land before the first scene-sourced laugh (the Sam/Theo wall-lean at l. 27) gets room. The chapter *opens by being witty about the cohort* and only becomes *funny inside scenes* after the first break. Not chapter-level MONOTONOUS (character source is the majority; seven other mechanisms are present), but a real front-load. See revision order 5.

**Source — PASS with WATCH.** Majority character/situation-sourced (Odile, the wall-lean, the dish logistics, the debrief, the corner). The narrator-overlay share is concentrated in the opening captions (items 5, 8, 9) and one lyric image (33, which earns its place). The three overlay captions that are also portable and workshopped are the blocking set below.

**Portability — PASS with WATCH.** Essentially all items are book-specific. Two watch-only images are sentence-level transferable but character-and-function-anchored (item 2 radiator; item 13 house-fire template). The four genuinely portable items are the four blocking captions.

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## CHAPTER VERDICT

**CLEAR** — comedy lands in register: majority funniness-2 (32 of 36), character/situation-sourced, non-portable, mechanisms varied. The flagged focus items all hold in the warm-low register: the radiator joke (2), the Ben flyer's "font he'd visibly agonized over" (4), dog-or-sofa (6/25, a two-instance gag varied on reprise), the empanada/dish logistics (13–16, 22), and "two rich people some drawings" (35) are warm and character-true, not a zinger treadmill. `which` captions, `whole` templates, the frozen deflecting-tag family, and sentence-quality/economy jokes are all absent (grep-verified). The snow and the Odile reveal are not undercut by jokes; the cohort warmth is not a forgiveness speech.

**Strongest surviving item:** items 11–12, the Sam/Theo wall-lean — "'It's meant to lean,' Theo said, and left it there. He'd have built Sam an explanation a month ago … the sermon. Now he went to top off a water jar that didn't need it." / Sam "said 'Huh' in the tone of a man filing something away." Register-collision comedy that is fully scene-sourced, non-portable, and does the chapter's biggest dramatic job — Theo's arc enacted (the sermon he *declines*) rather than narrated. Runner-up: Odile's "I'm retiring, not dead." (l. 125).

**Weakest surviving item:** item 8 — "making himself necessary so quietly it read as standing still" (l. 11): a predictable narrator-overlay paradox that under-delivers as comedy and characterizes Theo in a shape that could sit in any book about a self-effacing helper. It, with items 5, 9, and 19, is blocking.

**Blocking rule:** CLEAR describes the distribution; the four funniness-1 / portable / workshopped items below remain per-item blocking and the chapter is not committable until they are resolved.

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## REVISION ORDERS

1. **(Item 5, l. 9)** "It had the decency to show the before, so that the after could be the surprise." — *Failure:* narrator-overlay + workshopped; personifies the flyer as having "decency" and runs a composed before/after symmetry — June-narration performing cleverness about an object, not comedy arising from Ben or the scene. *Fix:* cut the sentence and let the picture do it — the empty-room photo beside the full room (already on the page in the two prior sentences) *is* the before/after; OR re-source into June's painter-eye per her voice card (visual nouns, jokes aimed at herself) by having her read the photograph as a picture — the bare easels, the value of the empty room — not praise the flyer's manners. Do not swap "decency" for a milder abstraction; remove the personification-caption.

2. **(Item 8, l. 11)** "making himself necessary so quietly it read as standing still" — *Failure:* narrator-overlay paradox, funniness-1, portable; a "so quietly it read as X" quip standing in for characterization. *Fix:* re-source into Theo's own care-register per his voice card ("absorbs logistics so others can be present," "fixes things wordlessly") by letting the concrete actions that *already follow* carry it — the row he has hung, the honest gaps between pictures, the easel he carried out — and cut the paradox tag. If a comic beat is wanted, build it from that specific book-inventory action, not a milder paradox.

3. **(Item 9, l. 17)** "standing next to your own picture while a room decides about it is a way to make everyone in it lie to you" — *Failure:* composed aphorism, narrator-overlay, portable (drops into any artist's book); also the head of the front-loaded reframe cluster. *Fix:* cut the maxim and keep the concrete motive already present ("made herself stay at the urn and take it in sideways, out of the eye that did her real looking"). If a comic beat is wanted here, source it from June's specific exposure-behavior per her card ("packs, sorts, cleans brushes she has not used … leaves before anyone can watch her want"), not a general observation.

4. **(Item 19, l. 57)** "Ruth nodded like a receipt" — *Failure:* workshopped simile sitting inside the chapter's gravest private beat (the confession Ruth agrees to keep); a cute "like a receipt" skims weight the scene needs. *Fix:* cut the simile and render Ruth's acknowledgment as an action true to her card ("makes room without fuss," "folds napkins/paper edges square") — she squares something and goes, or simply "Ruth nodded," letting "It's the best thing on the wall" carry the beat. Do not substitute another editorial simile; her one sanctioned sharp line is already spent on "It's the best thing on the wall."

5. **(Verdict-level — reframe/overlay front-load)** The small-thing-plus-dry-caption mechanism carries the opening third and skews narrator-overlay: ll. 3, 7, 9, 11 (×2), 17, 35, 47 — eight reframe-tags before the scene-sourced comedy at l. 27 gets air. *Order:* with orders 1–3 executed (removing ll. 9, 11-second, 17), thin one more survivor so the opening leans on character/situation — best candidates item 7 ("leveled a shelf against them," l. 11) or item 13 ("bring food to a house fire," l. 35); keep the one that is most character-defining, cut the other to plain action. The scene-sourced comedy from l. 27 onward (wall-lean, dish logistics, debrief, Odile, the corner) is strong and varied — protect it by not front-loading the overlay wit ahead of it.
