Carrot Top marks 10 years at Luxor by revisiting his early days

He still looks youthful, and boy does he act young onstage. So forgive those who hear only the first half of the sentence: Carrot Top recently celebrated 10 years at Luxor.

"People kept saying to me all week, 'Wow, 10 years, that's amazing.' Then I said, 'It's not just been 10 years, it's been 30 years.' People are confused, (thinking) that I've only done 10 years in comedy."

But, yes, the guy under the explosive orange 'fro is 50. And America's best-known prop comic has worked on the Strip since 1994. Occasional headliner dates at Bally's and the MGM Grand led to what began as a three-year deal to work in the second-floor Luxor theater, starting in late 2005.

Now he and the MGM have agreed to another five-year contract extension. No small feat, considering how many big-name comedians work the Strip on any given weekend.

During Carrot Top's 10 years under the pyramid, fellow stand-ups George Wallace and Rita Rudner gave up on a year-round presence. He and Eddie Griffin are now the only stand-up headliners (not counting comedy magicians) to perform most of the year — and Griffin hits the road on weekends.

Last week, the comedian known offstage as Scott Thompson went back to where it all began, Florida, to do anniversary shows celebrating the comic origins of the kid who started working his way up the club circuit there in 1985.

"I found a picture of my first performance," he says. "I have, like, a banker's haircut ... a little preppy kid."

Letting it grow into an orange mane gave him a stage name. But it was the visual jokes, the props, that gave Carrot Top a career.

For this run of anniversary shows, "I put together a whole trunk of my original stuff I started with in 1986. All my old props," he says. "It's like a musician breaking out the old catalog from the early days."

About half of them are the originals, while others were rebuilt to take advantage of his current warehouse and ability to build whatever he can imagine.

One of those earliest jokes involved putting ramps on the front of cars so instead of colliding, "we could just jump over each other." The original car "just looked like a triangle." Rebuilding it with toy cars and Plexiglass "got a bigger laugh."

But, he adds, "my stuff was so different back then." The original Carrot Top was more the creator of "invention-y kind of stuff": Putting a level on an ice tray so the water wouldn't spill on the way back to the fridge, that sort of thing.

A comedy club manager in West Palm Beach encouraged him to keep going with his "little toys," and he did. He was up to six trunks and 200 theater and college dates a year by the time he signed his Luxor deal.

With his mother having moved to Las Vegas ahead of him, Thompson started house hunting within months after the Luxor shows began.

Working the MGM Grand two weeks at a stretch was "a fun little vacation," he says of staying in the hotel in the years when he was singled out as a younger-than-average headliner, drawing a younger-than-average crowd to the showrooms.

"But when I got the show six nights a week, after about two weeks of going up the inclinator (Luxor's version of an elevator), I decided, 'I've got to find a normal life.'

"That was a lifesaver. You feel like a normal person really," he says of commuting from Summerlin.

Thompson can at least thank his younger self for a run of jokes homing in on the Las Vegas tourist experience, from toting around a tank-sized margarita to stumbling down an endless hallway, trying to figure out which door is your room. "I lived it enough to be able to talk about it," he says.

Ten years at Luxor also reinforce a gradual change in respect. While the Carrot Top act includes a running commentary on how bad his show is, only in the past few years did other people stop agreeing with him.

Snooty stand-ups dismissed the visual jokes as somehow demeaning the craft, and it seeped into pop culture: On the animated "King of the Hill," young Bobby aspired to be a famous prop comic like "Celery Head."

But just last week, Mirage headliner Ron White attended the show and afterward told Thompson he was "a true comic," admitting he was one of the comedians "who gave you (grief) back in the day."

"I never had a problem being labeled a prop comic, because that's what I do," Thompson says. That said, "it always bothered me when people would say, 'He can't just tell a joke. He has to have all this junk.' "

To say that doesn't give him credit for all the time not spent exploring his gag trunks. "It would be very tiresome for me and the crowd if it was just prop, prop, prop," he says. "You want to get a little bit of character, so when they leave, it's like they met a comic. When there's more storytelling, they get to know you as a person too. For me, it's a nice little break from doing the props."

But he has become addicted to his video screen. Maybe he will next be known as a PowerPoint comic?

"It's one more element, one more way of presenting a punch line without having to build a prop," he says. "But now I've created a monster with it. Almost every joke, I can put up a picture."

The current set animates Donald Trump's hair in one photo, and puts a Trump haircut on Hillary Clinton in another. Those jokes may not be good for another five years, but it looks like an equally distinctive orange hairdo will be.

— Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.