Carrot Top Has Headlined the Luxor Since 2005. His Critics Are Still Booking Rooms

There are two ways to be remembered in comedy. One is to be loved by critics, and the other is to be working. Carrot Top, whose mother calls him Scott Thompson, chose the second, and he's been at it so long that the first has started to look like a hobby for people with day jobs.

The facts are these. He did his first stand-up as a freshman at Florida Atlantic University, broke through on television in the early 1990s, and in 1994 won the American Comedy Award for best male stand-up. Then came the commercials for 1-800-CALL-ATT, which made him famous in the way a jingle is famous, and in 1998 came Chairman of the Board, his one starring movie. It cost $7 million and made about $306,000. It has 11 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a Razzie nomination for Worst New Star, and a New York Times review that found him without an atom of charm. Most careers die there. His just changed buildings.

In November 2005 he opened at the Luxor in Las Vegas on what was supposed to be a three-year deal. MGM Resorts extended him in 2019, and again in 2023, through 2030. By the end of that he'll have headlined the same room for 25 years, Monday through Saturday at 8 p.m., which local outlets already called the longest run of any headlining comic in town. Las Vegas Weekly's Best of Vegas has named him the city's best comedian in several recent years. In Vegas they don't give you an award for being interesting. They give it to you for being there when the lights come on.

His detractors don't like to say it out loud, but prop comedy is hard. It's stand-up with luggage. Every bit needs a thing, and every thing needs a trunk, and every trunk needs a fellow to carry it, and if the joke dies you can't even blame the audience, because they saw the prop coming. A man who can make a crowd laugh at a contraption six nights a week for twenty years knows something about timing that a lot of men with Netflix specials have never had to learn.

I've sat through a great many comics whose whole act was explaining their divorce, and I'll take a guy with a trunk full of nonsense over that every time. At least the trunk has a plan.

None of this makes him the poet laureate of anything. The hair is still the hair, and some of the props are exactly as dumb as you'd hope. But the people who spent the 1990s using him as shorthand for bad comedy have mostly gone quiet, retired or started podcasts, and he's still on the Strip, selling tickets in a pyramid. The pharaohs built those to be remembered forever. He's the only one in there who's still getting laughs.