Carrot Top’s sad headline-grabbing weekend made us realize we had yet to address probably the biggest myth of Las Vegas comedy.

For anyone who watched David Letterman or listened to Howard Stern in the last millennium, there was no reason to judge his material firsthand—the pop-culture verdict was already in: Carrot Top was an unfunny prop comic.

For the better part of two decades, both the king of late night and the self‑proclaimed King of All Media leaned heavily into Carrot Top as a recurring punching bag.

Because he relied on props, sported a wild look, and established a dominant Las Vegas presence, he fit perfectly into the “anti-showbiz” persona cultivated by both arbiters of Gen-X cool. Across the 1990s and early 2000s, “Carrot Top” became universal shorthand for lazy, cringeworthy comedy.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

In the late 2000s, we wrote a humor column for the Las Vegas Review-Journal . Titled “Fear and Loafing,” it involved sampling odd jobs around town. One we wanted to try out was working as a personal assistant to a Vegas celebrity.

Every resident headliner up and down the Strip either declined or ignored our request. Most likely, the downside of having a working reporter snoop around their private life outweighed any potential upside.

He had no problem inviting a reporter to his home (alongside his real assistant, Jeff Molitz) to wake him up, or giving us the assignment of procuring a radio-controlled taxi for one of his prop jokes.