Gompert & Day: the ironist disarmed

The House's professional ironist, disarmed. Day — the great AA-debunker and educated sneer of scene 066 — here "speaks softly" and tells the billowing-shape story with every defense down, and when Gompert jabs "Like you really care," he doesn't return the volley; he answers plain: "I identify to an extent." The man who built a career weaponizing irony against the Program's clichés drops it completely to offer a single-entendre testimony to a suffering stranger, asking nothing, performing nothing. It's his Crocodile-predicted softening caught live — the ironist discovering that the only thing that reaches another defended person is the thing irony exists to prevent: saying the true thing straight, at the risk of being told you don't mean it. (His reflex flickers once — minimizing his own horror as "some random bit of psychic flatulence" — the same shame-of-sincerity idiom Marathe names in 072.)