I’m in the attic of a bar in Lincoln Heights doing a benefit show for Ukraine. Judging by the tiny audience, people have stopped caring about Ukraine.
We're having a good time, though. A comic who I haven't seen in years shows up with her new dog. He's newly neutered; she has him wearing a tiny neck pillow instead of a cone. It's, dare I say, chic.
Because I give off a strong "friend to all animals" vibe she asks me to hold him during her set. Because I am a friend to all animals, I oblige. Walter and I watch his owner entertain the 15 audience members who meet at the intersection between "people who like comedy" and "people who still care about Ukraine." He sits very patiently in my lap for about 75% of her set. He's a very good boy.
I show her pictures of my cats while she reclaims Walter. She thinks one of them has a very silly-looking mouth, and she's right. I tell her how much he drools, how the vets have said it's a response to how happy he is. She and I both come to recognize that becoming a pet owner means that you take on a different view of excretions. "I let him lick my face," she says, "and it doesn't gross me out. When he takes a shit, even that doesn't gross me out. But someone else's dog?"
"You don't know what's been in there," I reply.
I'll let Edgar drool on me any time he wants to. He's leaking joy. I can't fault the boy for that.
The morning after, I fly to Las Vegas. No shows on the books, just watching sports and eating steaks and rolling dice.
I float the idea of seeing Carrot Top to the group chat, and my pals are on board. So Monday night, after an evening of dry-aged ribeyes and bubble craps, we make our way to the Luxor. After walking down a winding hallway adorned with photos of ol’ Scotty T. himself on one side and showgirls for the 10:30 PM topless revue on the other, we sit in our cheap seats and watch the show.
Here’s a sentence can I write without a shred of irony: Carrot Top’s show is funny. Funnier than you’d think it has any right to be.
Sure, he's got bits that haven't changed in years, even decades. But it's also obvious that he still possesses a sharp comic mind. He’s a performer who puts his nearly 40 years of experience to good use. A guy who still manages to write good jokes the same way you'd hope any other 40-year veteran of the game would be writing good jokes.
His show is paradoxical: both timeless and a relic, stuck in the craw of what America thinks stand-up comedy is, and perhaps more importantly, who America thinks Carrot Top is.
Carrot Top is a high-concept Rodney Dangerfield; a man who has spent his career getting no respect, and leaning into that perception. Early on in the show, he plays a clip of a Fox News pundit trashing Joe Biden’s agenda, capped off with: “who’s writing these policies, Carrot Top?” Cue big laughs.
For a man who was famously roasted by Norm Macdonald – the exacting stand-up whose ideal of the perfect joke is one “where the setup and punchline [are] identical” – it’s fitting that years later, he would achieve roundabout perfection. Carrot Top has become both setup and punchline.
In the attic of the bar in Lincoln Heights, a few days before I go see Carrot Top, I'm talking to a friend about our plan to see the show. He says something that I've never heard anyone say: "Carrot Top revolutionized joke structure."
"Jeff Foxworthy did it first by putting the punchline before the setup," he continues, "then Carrot Top did it by making the punchline something visual." Boiled down, this explanation makes a strange sort of sense.
Carrot Top walked so Demetri Martin could run.
Why is Carrot Top still a punchline? Because he‘s a prop comic? Because he looks weird? Because he, in 2022, is still doing jokes about Paul Reubens getting caught jerking off in a porn theater?
Or is it because he, like many performers on the fringes of funny, is a little “out there?”
The thought that crossed my mind as I walked out of the theater at Luxor that night: every "clown" in Los Angeles is, on some level, aspiring to be Carrot Top.
Carrot Top puts on the kind of show that wouldn't seem out of the ordinary at The Elysian, The Yard, The Pack, or, dare I say, UCB. As much as the "alt scene" types might roll their eyes at the comparison, their performances are as wacky, big, and meta as his. Plus, their shows would be more geared to a Vegas residency than the average comedian's would. The tourist trap of Vegas hinges on spectacle. While great comics pass through every single week at clubs up and down the Strip, there’s a reason Carrot Top endures: he’s got more than words to keep you hooked. It’s hard to pull off 17 years and almost four thousand shows with nothing to look at other than a man on stage.
He is a clown in the truest sense; a clown with sound cues and props and jokes every thirty seconds (or less). He gets vulnerable. He gets critical. He gets laughs.
There’s a reason people say he’s got the best show you never wanted to see.