At home with Carrot Top
By LESLIE GRAY STREETER
Cox News Service
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
LAS VEGAS ” “So what do you think of this?”
Carrot Top is sketching something, leaning over the counter in the kitchen of his 5,000-square-foot Vegas home, an Asian-inspired paradise with vaulted ceilings that appears to have sprung, fully decorated, from an In Style magazine.
He points to a stick-and-circle drawing of a car, with a stick-figured baby strapped to the front like antlers on J.R. Ewing’s grille.
“It’s a seat for Britney Spears’ baby, “he explains.
Funny.
“So the baby’s strapped on the front, see, and we could get a little car, and get a little baby doll, and put it on there somehow, “he continues, glancing at his assistant, Jeff. “You think we could find something like that?”
Jeff the assistant nods encouragingly. His boss puts his head back down and keeps sketching.
Here are some things you need to know about Carrot Top, famous Florida prop comic, 2006 Nevada magazine Comedian of the Year, collect-call pitchman and manic man of a thousand sight gags:
” His name is Scott Thompson. He’s 39, and he’s from Cocoa Beach, Fla. He graduated from Boca Raton’s Florida Atlantic University, or “the Harvard of Florida “as he’s called it in his show.
” Scott Thompson and Carrot Top are two separate people . . . most of the time. As nutty-zany-wacky as he is on stage, and in his current show at Vegas’ Luxor Hotel, he’s sometimes surprisingly mellow, thoughtful and given to long bursts of dialogue about his show, his life, and the next gag to be added to the trunks of props that make up his act.
” He is noticeably and unusually buff. And wearing beautifully drawn eyeliner. After about 20 minutes with him, you barely notice that anymore.
Have you ever heard actors say that comedy is harder than drama? Likewise, the comedy of Carrot Top takes a lot more intricate design than the sum of its various shticky parts.
Every prop, each comprising maybe 10 seconds of stage time ” say, the perfectly constructed three-tiered confection of Coors Light cans (“It’s Kid Rock and Pamela Lee’s wedding cake!”) or the swastika-spinning car rims (“It’s Mel Gibson’s car!”) ” takes careful planning and sketching, long trips to Home Depot, toy stores, junk yards and various vendors of doodads, and then construction in the warehouse where Carrot Top keeps his stage stuff.
But for all the weird props, the eye makeup and the gorgeous house, “I’m just a normal guy who got lucky, “Thompson says. “I’ve just been blessed to have success.”
‘I can turn into Carrot Top’
He starts walking.
“You want the tour? “he says, friendly, but with the unspoken acknowledgement that it’s slightly weird to be walking a perfect stranger through your house. That’s another thing about him, something that differentiates Scott from Carrot Top. Carrot Top would be running through the place, laughing and opening drawers that rubber snakes and ping-pong balls would pop out of.
But Scott Thompson is polite and normal, or as normal as a buff guy with big red hair and beautifully done eyeliner can be. But normal, sort of, is what he’s going for.
“At the right time, I can turn into Carrot Top, “he says, while pointing out a huge abstract painting of Ray Charles hung above his mantel. “(The difference is) the energy level. Carrot Top is a little more of a character, like ‘Hey, everybody!’ ”
Buying this house is part of that quest for normalcy. He owns a place in Winter Park, outside Orlando, that he’s seldom at. But after years of traveling, he’s set down roots in Las Vegas, at the Luxor and at this house that he bought after living in one of the hotel’s swanky suites for four months.
It’s an experience he describes as living “on a cruise ship, but docked. It’s hard living in a hotel. I wanted to have my privacy, but that’s hard. All these years living on the road, I thought I had the best gig going, “he says. “But this . . . I get to wake up in my own bed. I feel like I’m semi-retired.”
The house is in a suburban, non-gated neighborhood, although there is a gate around it, leading to a fountain and a large sliding glass door that opens onto a tiled foyer leading to his-and-her bedrooms suites and another shaded courtyard where Thompson has his morning coffee. Walk around from the courtyard, and there’s a small designer-looking pool surrounded by a privacy wall.
It could be in Wellington. It’s very grown-up, which seems appropriate for an almost 40-year-old man, but kind of funny for a guy sketching Britney Spears props in his kitchen.
“I always feel like ‘I have to go before the real owner gets here!’ ” he says, his voice rising, as it occasionally does, to its familiar higher Carrot Top register.
‘All about the hair’
Here’s a strange but true fact. The house, decorated with ethnic vases, plush furniture and not one goofy hat, was made out of material left over from Celine Dion’s house. Apparently the same builder that created Dion’s 10,000-square-foot manse where she lives while doing her show at Caesar’s Palace, later built this one, Thompson says.
It was already done when he bought it, so it’s just a weird coincidence. But then, in the weird six degrees of separation that the rest of us imagine bind everyone more famous than us, it seems to make sense.
“You wanna go get something to eat, or order something? “Thompson asks Jeff.
Go get something, it’s decided, and so everybody piles into Thompson’s ginormous black Hummer ” Jeff drives, and Thompson slides into the back seat, his red curls shaking slightly at the motion.
“My curls do better here (than in Florida) with the humidity, “he says. “Here, it’s a dry heat.”
He smiles.
“It’s all about the hair. And my huge sex appeal.”
Florida figures prominently in his Luxor show, with jokes about everything from the morbid tendencies of local meteorologists during hurricane season (he shows several of those ominous swirling red hurricane symbols descending on the state as if to eat it) to the state’s resemblance on the map to the male sex organ.
Turns out that he kids because he loves.
“I used to do so many jokes about it, particularly when I was performing in Florida, “he says. “It’s an eclectic place. There’s not a lot of people from Florida who actually live there, so to be a native was rare. But now that I’m grown up, it seems there were a lot of people raised there, just like in Vegas.”
His father, Larry, was literally a rocket scientist, working on the Gemini and Apollo space projects. He still lives in Florida, while Thompson’s mother, a teacher, has lived in Vegas for years ” another coincidence. His brother Garret, who was at the previous night’s show, is a fighter pilot. Scott, for his part, was the admitted class clown.
“I was a good student, but my family was like ‘Comedy? What?’ ” he says. “I was raised in a family of brains, and I was the black sheep as far as they were concerned. I’ve been a success with it, so they’ve accepted it.”
‘One-on-one with audience’
He jokes that he chose Boca’s FAU “because it was the only place I got accepted, “but he was really too nervous to journey to Florida State University, and felt that FAU, where he had a friend already attending, “was a good school, not too far from home. And it was right on the ocean. And there aren’t too many colleges next to the ocean.”
It was at FAU that Thompson turned his class clown tendencies into occasional gigs, and then into a career. He started performing on campus, at the Rathskeller restaurant, and then at local comedy clubs, like West Palm Beach’s Comedy Corner.
“I remember my first time on stage at the Rathskeller. I look like I’m 9, I’m holding an FAU newspaper, and just telling jokes out of the paper, “he remembers. “I had two little props. One of them was a Martina Navratilova tennis racket that you could hit with either side . . . that goes both ways.”
Thompson smiles, adding “of course, she’s not bisexual, just gay. So she really only goes one way.”
Oh well. Very early on, he established his prowess with a sight gag, and his realization that such gags established instant rapport with the audience ” “Most comedy shows are performance shows. (The comics) hope to get a response. But I feel like I’m one-on-one with the audience. I get feedback.”
And that’s one of the reasons he works so hard on his act. His gags are constantly changing to keep up with the water-cooler talk, the cues people will get immediately because they’re on our minds.
“I pride myself on keeping current, “he explains, citing a bit on Paris Hilton’s then-just released album, the Mel Gibson and Kid Rock jokes, and one about Dell computers. “You know to change the jokes when people stop laughing. I had to get rid of the Clinton jokes, the Sally Struthers jokes.”
Is it hard to let the good bits like that go?
“Oh, yeah, “he says. “There are some comedians still doing Nixon jokes.”
As he peruses the menu at a barbecue restaurant, and snacks on a shared order of cheesy bread, a waiter comes over to suggest a healthy entree. It’s apparent, of course, that the crazily muscular guy across the table is no longer the skinny Wendy’s girl look-alike that popped on the scene in the early 1990s.
So, is this one of those things you hear about on “Oprah, “where a celebrity admits to changing themselves to distance themselves from the dorkiness of their past?
“Yeah, I’m crying on the inside, “he says, smiling down at his meal. “I was a redheaded freckled kid, who didn’t fit in with the rest of the people, but I’m not pained about that. I was never bullied. I was always liked in school. I was on the wrestling team. I just like working out.”
‘A normal guy with feelings’
Thompson says he hits the gym five or six days a week, even on days when he doesn’t want to go ” “I don’t really ever want to go, “he says, “but you have to really want it. I don’t do it for anyone else. I do it for me. Just for me.”
He may not have been bullied in school, but he has gotten his share of hard knocks from critics and people who just see him as the AT&T commercial guy, a goofball with a trunk. Thompson’s willing to let a lot of that go ” after all, he makes his living making fun of people. But “I am a normal guy with feelings. I almost wish I didn’t have that in me.”
There may be haters, but there are also plenty of fans. A few days after this lunch, Thompson made his 25th “Tonight Show “appearance since 1993. His Luxor show is a regular sell-out. And he attracts a lot of attention, even in an anything-goes place like Las Vegas.
He gets a double take from the guy in the Mercedes waiting to turn left at the median next to the Hummer; the waitress at the barbecue place opens her eyes wide, and then not-so-subtly asks if he’d like to be seated in the back.
Patrons at various tables do a poor job pretending they don’t see him, until, on the way out, a father eating with his family asks Thompson to wait until his daughters come out of the bathroom, because “they really wanted to say hi to you.”
Being famous also presumably made him popular in his days of “gallivanting around, “he says, but it’s not an issue in his current relationship, with a woman who does Web design ” “She knew who I was, but she’s not like ‘My boyfriend’s Carrot Top!’ ” he says. “This is part of my new life.”
Like the smart guy he is, Thompson knows that nothing is guaranteed to last forever. For the time being, he’s doing his Luxor show, enjoying his relationship, his home and a chance to breathe. A chance to just be Scott.
“Being that person all the time, being Carrot Top . . . I can’t walk out on stage and be Scott, “he says, now back at home and stepping out of the Hummer. “I just know I get to escape, and go be Scott all day.”
He smiles, gives a hug, and steps into the house to go do just that for a couple of hours, before Carrot Top and his trunks hit the Luxor again.
By the way, he wound up changing the Britney Spears joke a little for the Tonight Show, and used the Kid Rock beer cake as well.
Both of them killed.
Leslie Gray Streeter writes for the Palm Beach Post.
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