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task: I would like a book on the universal nature of humor. There are certain types of humor that transcend time, culture and language (e.g. comedy wildlife photos, physical humor, affiliative humor, etc). This is a 5-7 chapter book, targeting armchair enthusiasts, and should explore this phenomena across cultural, temporal, language, belief, and technological boundaries. Thesis: Humor is what unites us. session_id: job-20260501-053328-911918--i-would-like-a-book-on-the-uni timestamp: 2026-05-01T08:11:25 status: pending

PLAN

A working plan to produce the manuscript described in INTENT.md. Every section serves a constraint or success criterion already named in the intent — this document does not introduce new goals.

Decisions to confirm

These are choices the intent leaves to the team. The plan below assumes them; the human can redirect any of them at ASSERT.

  1. Era spine for ch2–6 is media-driven, not century-driven.
  2. Ch2: Oral / pre-text antiquity (through ~500 CE)
  3. Ch3: Manuscript era (~500–1500)
  4. Ch4: Print era (~1500–1900)
  5. Ch5: Broadcast era (~1900–2000)
  6. Ch6: Algorithmic / information age (2000–present) — the chapter the intent fixes Rationale: media transitions make the universality claim demonstrable rather than asserted. A pratfall surviving oral → manuscript → print → broadcast → algorithm is the book's central trick, and the spine has to set it up. Time-driven splits (ancient/medieval/early-modern/modern) lose this leverage.
  7. Drafting cadence is sequential, ch1 → ch7. Narrator-as-discoverer and the escalating-argument architecture both depend on the writer remembering what the reader has just been shown. Parallel chapter drafts produce voice drift and redundant cases; the time saved is repaid in line-edit and flow passes.
  8. Voice is calibrated on ch1 before ch2–7 commit. The David Shapiro × Mary Roach target is specific enough to miss. A first-person-singular voice bible falls out of drafting ch1 and is then enforced as a reference in line edit.
  9. Pass sequence (after full draft): structural/thesis → fact / intellectual honesty → flow → reader-experience audit (1st pass — funny-test + absorption) → line edit/voice → AI smell → reader-experience audit (2nd pass — confirms no regressions) → copyedit. Rationale: do load-bearing changes first, polish last; run the funny-test early enough that injecting humor is still cheap, and again at the end to guard regressions.

Phase 0 — Architecture

Deliverable: manuscript/architecture.md. One document, ~2000–3000 words, that fixes the load-bearing decisions before any chapter is drafted.

Contents:

  • Thesis arc. A paragraph per chapter naming what each chapter contributes to the argument that the previous chapter could not. Ch7 is included — its job is to stress-test, not to summarize.
  • Era spine. The five era chapters (2–6) with the date ranges from "Decisions to confirm" above, and a one-line statement of what each era's medium makes possible or constrains for comedy.
  • Case slate. 2–4 cases per chapter, vetted-source-only. Each entry: the case, what it demonstrates, primary source(s), and which boundary axes (cultural/temporal/linguistic/belief/technological) it crosses. This is the master list the no-synthetic-anecdotes gate is checked against. A case is eligible only when at least one named primary or scholarly source is on file.
  • Impact moments. 3–5 designed set-pieces, located by chapter and approximate position. Each entry: the scene, why it lands, what it earns for the argument. These are the moments the manuscript is engineered around — the rest of the prose connects them.
  • Counterexample slate (ch7). The divisive-humor cases and genuinely-not-universal cases the book commits to engaging with. Same source-vetting rule.
  • Word budget. A target word count per chapter summing to ~80K (mid of the 70–90K band). The intent leaves distribution to the team; this document fixes it. Chapters can over- or undershoot by ~15% before the budget is renegotiated.
  • Voice probe. Two paragraphs of sample prose in the target voice, used as a reference object during ch1 drafting and for line-edit calibration thereafter.

Phase 0 ends when architecture.md is approved by the human. The case slate is the single largest checkpoint here — once it is approved, drafting commits to those cases and changing them is treated as scope renegotiation.

Phase 1 — Per-chapter drafting

Sequential, ch1 → ch7. Each chapter runs through the same loop:

  1. Research pass. For each case in the chapter's slate, pull primary or scholarly sources into research/ch{n}/. Notes capture the specific anecdote, dates, attributions, and quotation if any. This is the substrate the no-synthetic-anecdotes gate is checked against later.
  2. Outline. A scene-by-scene outline for the chapter, showing how cases are sequenced, where the analysis seasoning sits (target ~80/20 story-to-analysis), and where any impact moment for this chapter lands. Outline is reviewed against the architecture's thesis arc — does this chapter sharpen the argument the way Phase 0 said it would?
  3. Draft. Single first-person-singular voice. No *** section breaks doing structural work — connective tissue is prose. Word count tracked against the chapter's budget.
  4. Per-chapter self-review checklist. Before declaring the chapter done, the author walks the chapter against this list. Failure on any item reopens the chapter:
  5. No-synthetic-anecdotes gate. Every anecdote in this chapter traces to a real, cited source in research/ch{n}/. Composites — even clearly framed — fail. (Intent-pinned ownership.)
  6. Thesis contribution. This chapter sharpens or stress-tests the thesis from the previous one. It does not just survey.
  7. Case depth. Cases are developed in depth, not enumerated. If a case appears only as a name-drop, it is cut or grown.
  8. Voice match. Spot-check against the voice probe from Phase 0. First-person-singular, narrator-as-discoverer, dry-and-warm balance.
  9. Boundary-axis coverage. The chapter's cases cross at least two of the five boundary axes between them (the book as a whole crosses all five; not every chapter has to).
  10. No structural typography. No *** breaks carrying argumentative weight. If a transition is missing, write it.
  11. Word budget. Chapter is within ~15% of the Phase 0 target.

Special cases inside Phase 1:

  • Ch1. First chapter drafted, also the voice bible. Ch1 establishes thesis framing and earns reader curiosity (intent's success criterion). After ch1 draft is in, the voice probe in architecture.md is updated to reflect what the prose actually became, so ch2–7 calibrate against the real voice.
  • Ch7. Engages divisive humor and the genuinely-not-universal as material to examine. The chapter does not celebrate or amplify exclusionary humor (intent's out-of-scope clause). The thesis resolves, doesn't dissolve — ch7 finishes with what is universal, sharpened by the stress test.

Phase 1 ends when all seven chapters have passed their per-chapter self-review.

Phase 2 — Manuscript-level passes

Run on the full manuscript in this order. Each pass produces a list of revisions; revisions are applied before the next pass starts (or the pass that finds them, if it can fix in place).

  1. Structural / thesis pass. Does the argument escalate ch1 → ch7? Does ch7 actually stress-test, not summarize? Are there chapters that can be cut or merged without losing the spine? This is the pass with license to recommend chapter-level surgery.
  2. Fact / intellectual honesty pass. Every cited source is checked. Every anecdote is checked against research/ch{n}/. Counter-evidence is treated honestly — if a case is stronger as a partial example than as a clean win, it is rewritten as a partial example. The pass also checks that the book does not overclaim against the boundary axes it has not actually crossed.
  3. Flow pass. Connective tissue between sections and chapters. No *** doing structural work. Reads as continuous prose, not stitched fragments. Transitions carry argument and image, not just topic.
  4. Reader-experience audit (1st pass). (Intent-pinned ownership of the funny-test.) Two checks:
  5. Funny-test. Does the prose itself produce laugh-or-grin moments at airport-book frequency? A leisure reader should notice. If the answer is no, this pass blocks until line edit injects humor where it should have been.
  6. Absorption. Does the manuscript hold a cold reader chapter-to-chapter? Where it sags, the flow pass and case-depth get re-opened. This pass is run on the full draft, not chapter-by-chapter, because absorption is a whole-book property.
  7. Line edit / voice pass. Sentence-level voice consistency against the (updated post-ch1) voice probe. First-person singular, dry-and-warm, narrator-as-discoverer. Dialect and rhythm normalized across chapters.
  8. AI smell pass. Hunt and remove residual machine-y patterns: over-hedged sentences, telegraphed transitions ("In this chapter we will…"), tricolons-of-three-where-two-would-do, em-dash overgrowth, structurally identical paragraph openers. Read aloud where in doubt.
  9. Reader-experience audit (2nd pass). Re-runs funny-test and absorption check after line edit and AI-smell. Catches regressions where polishing flattened a joke.
  10. Copyedit pass. Mechanical: spelling, punctuation, citation format, hyphenation, capitalization conventions. Last pass because earlier passes invalidate it.

A pass blocks if it finds a defect it cannot fix in place. The pass owner records the defect, the manuscript loops back to the appropriate earlier phase, and passes resume from where the loop returns.

Phase 3 — Notes section and final compile

  • Notes section. All citations consolidated into a notes section at the back. Inline references in the prose are minimized — the prose carries voice; rigor lives in the notes (intent's "rigor without footnote clutter" constraint).
  • Final word count. Confirm the manuscript falls within 70–90K. If it lands materially below 70K, the structural pass is reopened — the book is too thin and needs to grow, not be padded.
  • Definition-of-done check. Walk the manuscript against the five DoD bullets in INTENT.md. Each must be defensible against a specific stretch of text.
  • Deliverable. A single-file or multi-file manuscript at manuscript/ (final form) plus manuscript/notes.md. Text-only — no visuals this phase, per intent.

Out of scope (this plan)

  • Visuals, photos, layout, cover, jacket copy. Intent defers these.
  • A taxonomy of humor or a comprehensive history. Intent rules these out.
  • Marketing, agent submission, publication logistics. Manuscript only.

Risks to watch

  • Voice drift across chapters. Mitigation: ch1 voice bible, line-edit pass, two reader-experience audits.
  • Case slate erosion. Cases that looked good in Phase 0 may not survive research. Mitigation: source-vetting before slate is closed; if a case fails research, replace from a backup pool sized at +1 per chapter.
  • Funny-test failure late. Mitigation: first reader-experience audit is run before the polish passes, so injection is still cheap. Author also writes ch1 with the funny-test explicitly in mind, not as a downstream verification.
  • Word count drift. Mitigation: per-chapter budget, ±15% tolerance, manuscript-level reconciliation in Phase 3.