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Carrot Top is sketching something, leaning over the counter in the kitchen of his 5,000-square-foot Las Vegas home, an Asian-inspired paradise with vaulted ceilings that appears to have sprung, fully decorated, from an In Style magazine.

His name is Scott Thompson. He's 39, and he's from Cocoa Beach. He graduated from Florida Atlantic University, or ''the Harvard of Florida'' as he's called it in his show.

Scott Thompson and Carrot Top are two separate people . . . most of the time. As nutty-zany-wacky as he is onstage, and in his current show at Vegas' Luxor Hotel, he's sometimes surprisingly mellow, thoughtful and given to long bursts of dialogue about his show, his life, and the next gag to be added to the trunks of props that make up his act.

Have you ever heard actors say that comedy is harder than drama? Likewise, the comedy of Carrot Top takes a lot more intricate design than the sum of its various shticky parts.

Every prop, each claiming maybe 10 seconds of stage time -- say, the perfectly constructed three-tiered confection of Coors Light cans (''It's Kid Rock and Pamela Lee's wedding cake!'') or the swastika-spinning car rims (''It's Mel Gibson's car!'') -- takes careful planning and sketching, long trips to Home Depot, toy stores, junkyards and various vendors of doodads, and then construction in the warehouse where Carrot Top keeps his stage stuff.

Thompson is polite and normal, or as normal as a buff guy with big red hair and beautifully done eyeliner can be. But normal, sort of, is what he's going for.

Buying this house is part of that quest for normalcy. He owns a place outside Orlando that he's seldom at. But after years of traveling, he's set down roots in Las Vegas, at the Luxor and at this house that he bought after living in one of the hotel's swanky suites for four months.

Florida figures prominently in his Luxor show, with jokes about everything from the morbid tendencies of local meteorologists during hurricane season (he shows several of those ominous swirling red hurricane symbols descending on the state as if to eat it to the state's resemblance on the map to the male sex organ.

His father, Larry, was literally a rocket scientist, working on the Gemini and Apollo space projects. He still lives in Florida, while Thompson's mother, a teacher, has lived in Vegas for years -- another coincidence. His brother Garret, who was at the previous night's show, is a fighter pilot. Thompson, for his part, was the admitted class clown.

It was at FAU that Thompson turned his class clown tendencies into occasional gigs, and then into a career. He started performing on campus, at the Rathskeller restaurant, and then at local comedy clubs, like West Palm Beach's Comedy Corner.

Like the smart guy he is, Thompson knows that nothing is guaranteed to last forever. For the time being, he's doing his Luxor show, enjoying his relationship, his home and a chance to breathe. A chance to just be Scott.

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