The Tragedy Of Carrot Top Explained

Since the early 1990s, the frenetic stand-up comedian known as Carrot Top has consistently ranked among the best-known and most crowd-pleasing joke tellers in the world, and that's due to a combination of his persona and approach. The man born Scott Thompson is adorned with a ton of curly, orange-red hair (hence the stage name), and his act is that of a prop comedian — he hauls out onto the stage trunks loaded with silly, goofy, and clever contraptions, inventions, and oddities. People seem to like it: After years as a venue-filling touring comic, he settled into a consistently popular and very lucrative residency in Las Vegas.

While Carrot Top is objectively popular, a lot of people seem to hate the guy. Mocked and teased and frequently made the punchline of jokes by professionals and amateurs alike, Carrot Top has faced a surprising amount of darkness and sadness in his life, and he has done so for years. Let's open up the trunk and pull out some of the most shocking, tragic, and sad elements of the life of Scott Thompson, aka Carrot Top.

In 2014, Carrot Top participated in a crusading documentary about the impact of youth bullying. He spoke from experience, as he'd been teased and mocked for most of his life, dating back to childhood. Carrot Top endured a lot of physical and emotional bullying while growing up in Florida, primarily for his appearance. "I have this kooky red hair, and people have made fun of me every freaking day," he told the Des Moines Register in 2015 before a charity show that benefitted an anti-bullying organization. "Some kids actually [die by] suicide over this. I can relate."

Much shorter than his peers as a child, the somehow offensively redheaded Carrot Top didn't have very many friends during his school years. Due to the relentless teasing of playground bullies, he avoided mostly all of the children at his private parochial school and spent recesses by himself playing with toy cars.

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A solid, winning show at one of a few particular venues can change the entire trajectory of a comedian's career. In the early 1990s, one of those star-making institutions was the StarDome Comedy Club in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1993, Carrot Top could have joined the likes of some of the best stand-up comedians of all time – StarDome alumni like Chris Rock, Sinbad, and Kevin Hart — had his scheduled appearance at the club actually happened. Instead, the day Carrot Top was supposed to take the stage, Birmingham was beset by the "Superstorm of 1993," and more than 12 inches of snow virtually buried the city. That led to a late-night fire at the comedy club, which caused the StarDome to sustain extensive damage. Unfortunately, Carrot Top's trunk full of props that were so vital to his routine had already been delivered to the club. "The place was destroyed, and so was my act," Carrot Top told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The night after the StarDome show, Carrot Top had been booked to perform on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." He had to call off the other potentially fame-boosting show. "Jay was joking, 'Yeah, Carrot Top was supposed to be here but he lost his whole show in a fire,'" Carrot Top remembered. "But it really happened. I had to rebuild my whole act."

Carrot Top, a man who tells jokes for a living, is often the punchline of humor doled out by other people who also tell jokes for a living. Despite a decades-long career in which he has consistently filled venues, appeared on television, and delighted fans, Carrot Top's objectively broad popularity translates to hatred and resentment among other professional comedians. When his "Chairman of the Board" co-star Courtney Thorne-Smith appeared on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," fellow guest Norm Macdonald eviscerated Carrot Top, suggesting the upcoming film ought to be called "Box Office Poison." A long-running joke on the animated sitcom "King of the Hill" concerned wannabe prop comic Bobby Hill's idolatry of a patently unfunny comedian named "Celery Head." On "South Park," he was presented as "Carrot A**" and he soiled himself during a performance.

Despite the verbal abuse both public and in private, as he has reportedly received, Carrot Top says he tried to never let it bother him because the praise outweighed the negativity. "When George Carlin said I was funny, that negated every a****** that said I sucked," he said on "The Joe Rogan Experience." "You kind of want other comics to go, 'Hey, man, I dig your style,' you know?"

Perhaps you rarely hear about Carrot Top anymore because his days as a leading man ended quickly. For many performers with a comic bent, stand-up comedy is a stepping stone toward a long-lasting career as an actor in films and television sitcoms. By the late 1990s, Carrot Top was one of the best-known comedians working the club and TV comedy circuit, and Hollywood beckoned. Carrot Top attempted to take his fame to the next level with the 1997 comedy movie "Chairman of the Board." The comic played a surfer and amateur inventor (whose gadgets resemble Carrot Top comedy props) who inherits a company after befriending a dying billionaire.

By any measure, "Chairman of the Board" was a massive flop. Delayed for a theatrical release until 1998, the movie made just $181,233 at the North American box office and was nominated for two bad-movie Razzie Awards, including "Worst New Star" for Carrot Top. Critics universally hated the movie and savaged the film and its star in their reviews. "Carrot Top, whose frazzled, fright-wiggy red locks remain his most finely developed gag, inspires marvel among many in the comedy world, mainly because he still manages to find work despite an almost utter lack of talent," wrote David Kronke of the Los Angeles Times. Obviously unwelcome in the movie industry, Carrot Top never again starred in a film or took on a major acting role, his film and TV work instead consisting almost entirely of self-deprecating cameos.

A '90s star that's unrecognizable now, Carrot Top is a longtime exercise and bodybuilding aficionado, and in the 2000s, he'd gotten quite muscle-bound. Suddenly appearing in public with the physique of a professional bodybuilder invited a great deal of both criticism and rumor-mongering about how Carrot Top had changed his appearance in what seemed to be a short period of time. "For a while I had gotten really big. I didn't do steroids or anything, I just worked out a lot, and I never had any plastic surgery," Carrot Top told Florida Today. "I never had any work done. I mean, if I was going to have plastic surgery, I would look better than this." Penn Jillette, of the comedy magic duo Penn and Teller, even made Carrot Top submit to a drug trust to publicly confirm that he wasn't taking drugs to assist in his muscle-building.

At "The Comedy Central Roast of Flavor Flav" in 2007, Carrot Top emerged as the preferred joke target, strictly over his appearance. "'You look like the guy from 'The Mask' or something,'" he recalled one comedian saying on "Oprah: Where Are They Now" (via HuffPost). "I get a lot of grief because I've always been in shape and I think for comedy in general, they don't expect comics to be in shape."

Because Carrot Top is a prop comedian, he doesn't merely tell jokes — he describes and riffs on contraptions he hauls onstage. Carrot Top devises and builds all of the props for his act, and that results in a lot of proprietary material. For all intents and purposes, Carrot Top is an inventor, but he doesn't secure patents on the items he makes for the sake of some quick jokes. At least once, someone seems to have exploited Carrot Top's manner of operations, lifting the premise of a gadget from the comedian's act and then going on to mass produce it.

"Someone stole and actually took the idea from me. I know they saw it; I did it on TV a thousand times. Someone saw it and made it into an actual product," Carrot Top lamented to the Chicago Tribune in 2020. The bit was about how some people like their toilet paper to dispense from the top of the roll, while others like it to come up from underneath. "So I made this thing on the wall where when you put your toilet paper in there, it would flip," he explained. "Everyone in the crowd would always laugh and say 'that's really cool,' more of an invention kind of thing. That one I was pretty proud of until someone ripped me off and is making billions of dollars off it now."

A bright spot in the tragic history of Las Vegas: Well-known performers used to grinding out a living on the road can permanently move there and take on a residency, performing multiple nights a week at the same theater inside a casino for an indefinite period of time. It's a lucrative and comfortable job, and comedian Carrot Top has enjoyed that lifestyle since 2005, when he began the first of two lengthy residencies. But if a resident performer is unable to perform for any reason, that threatens their livelihood. In 2019, Carrot Top utilized a brief break in his performance schedule for a snowboarding trip to Utah. He sustained a serious injury to his left leg while up on a mountain. "It affected everything I did, moving around the stage, reaching for props," he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

When the pandemic took hold in 2020, lockdown measures were in place to prevent the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus. Carrot Top couldn't publicly perform at all for most of the year. When the state of Nevada lifted restrictions somewhat in early 2021, Carrot Top returned to live shows, playing to 100 people in a 1,500-seat theater.

Stand-up comedy is a tight-knit community, and those who have come up in the same time periods and continue to perform in the same venues are particularly close with one another. As a major comedian in the form's boom period of the 1980s and 1990s, Carrot Top became friendly with a handful of other prominent stand-ups of the time, people like Bob Saget and Louie Anderson. Both of those comics died in a very short time period, and their unexpected deaths at relatively young ages hit Carrot Top very hard.

The heart-wrenching death of Bob Saget arrived in January 2022. Saget died at age 65 after performing in Orlando, Florida. He suffered a head trauma, went to sleep in his hotel room bed, and never woke up. "I knew him in a very small capacity, which was wild that he was so friendly towards me," Carrot Top told Metal Life Magazine. "Bob was always one of those guys that really loved and respected me."

Less than two weeks after Saget's death came the tragic death of Louie Anderson at age 68 due to the effects of blood cancer. "Louie Anderson was like my brother. We had a very close relationship," Carrot Top said to QRO. "I went to the hospital, and I was holding his hand the last day he was there, and it was rough."

Carrot Top was born and raised in Florida, living primarily with his father, Larry Thompson. The latter worked at NASA's facilities at the Kennedy Space Center as an engineer and astronaut trainer in the 1960s, serving in the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Space Shuttle projects over the span of 30 years. "I didn't even think anything of it — when you're a kid, you just think your dad's a nerd, and he's going to go to work," Carrot Top told "The Tiny Meat Gang" podcast. "And he'd say, 'You want to go to a launch?' and I'm like, 'No I don't want to go to a launch, I want to watch 'Brady Bunch.'" The comedian's mother, Dona Wood, owned a tennis shop, and she split from Carrot Top's father when the future star was 13 years old. "I was at the age where you don't get it; I was surprised at it, and it wasn't a happy thing," Carrot Top told the Las Vegas Sun. "Once it happened, it was probably better for everybody, and I became closer to my father as a result."

In August 2016, Carrot Top's beloved father, Larry Thompson, died in Titusville, Florida, at the age of 76.