Yeah, I duplicated the original, added the compression to the copy, boosted the gain on the original to have the volume the same on both tracks and they sound identical to me.
Basically, I'm just trying to use it as an amplification tool. I've only really used normalization in the past, but for shows with large dynamic ranges, I'm curious if correct use of compression (no necessarily what I did here) could help with a more "even" amplification as opposed to just boosting evenly across the board.