The Rise of Carrot Man
November 4, 2013 – Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
“I can’t believe you dragged me out of bed for this. Kids’ parties aren’t exactly my scene,” Vinnie Razzano complained to his sister, Lisa.
“I thought you said you wanted to be a good uncle,” Lisa replied. “Good uncles show up at birthday parties, even if they’d rather be sleeping.”
Vinnie and Lisa were sitting on lawn furniture in Lisa’s backyard. The eight-year-old party guests were shrieking and shooting each other with squirt guns. Some of their parents looked on. Vinnie was wearing sunglasses as he peered up at the sky.
“It’s so bright out here,” Vinnie said to his sister. “Don’t you think everything is brighter out here than it was in Jersey?”
“If you say so. You’re the lighting expert,” replied Lisa.
“If I could just lean back a little in this chair, maybe I could take a quick nap,” said Vinnie. “Why did you have to buy the most uncomfortable chairs in the world? It’s like I’m sitting up straight in a courtroom or something.”
“Sorry I can’t cater to your all-day napping schedule.”
“You know how late I’m up at the clubs. I can’t help it. Those are the gigs I can get.”
“If the only gigs you can get are telling dirty stories at three in the morning to an empty room, maybe you need to try something else.”
“Whoa! I come over here and you give me a hard time? Where’s this coming from? I thought we were supposed to support each other and our dreams or whatever.”
“Your dream is telling perverted jokes to drunks? You used to talk about doing your act in a big theater with 5000 people watching. You remember telling me that?”
“Yeah sure. But you know how many comedians in Vegas can sell out a 5000 seat show? Maybe five. It’s not so easy.”
“You were supposed to be getting better and working up to it. It’s like you’re only getting worse.”
“What is this, dump on Vinnie day? I don’t need this.”
“Who else is going to say it? I think you should make some changes. I mean, you don’t want your niece and nephew being embarrassed of you, do you?”
“You mean you’re embarrassed by me. Well sorry. That’s great to know. My little sister thinks I’m a loser. How about you get out of my face and mind your own business?”
Lisa stood up and walked away like she had just finished some terrible job like cleaning toilets.
Vinnie picked up his chair and rotated it so he was facing the stucco wall surrounding the yard. He snarled to himself but he knew his sister was right. Who could be happy with his life? He had let himself go to the point that he hated looking at himself in the mirror. He was completely overweight and losing his hair and his mind. It was eleven o’clock in the morning but he could not remember the last time he had been awake this early. He craved a cigarette and a drink.
Vinnie had thought a lot about going back to New Jersey. It would be a fresh start, or maybe a fresh restart. His parents were dead, but surely he could dig up some of his old friends. There were lots of comedy clubs he could try out, including new ones who had never heard of him and vice versa.
The thing about moving to Jersey was that there was so little chance his career was going to turn around. He was the same old poser comedian he had always been. People were not going to suddenly decide he was funny.
Vinnie turned his chair back around so he could see his niece and nephew with their water guns. They were his sister’s kids but he still felt some weird connection to them. It was the closest thing to real responsibility he knew. If he ever did leave, he would miss seeing them. His sister’s words about them being embarrassed by him actually stung.
Lisa returned, collecting chairs to set around the table for lunch. She did not ask Vinnie to move.
“You got something to drink?” Vinnie asked his sister.
“We’re having lemonade and soda with lunch,” she replied.
“I was thinking of something a little stronger. At least a beer.”
“This is a kids’ party, Vinnie, not the poolside bar at the Hard Rock. Why don’t you do something productive like serving the pizza?”
“Why you gotta nag me all the time?” replied Vinnie.
Despite his agitation, he got up and shuffled toward the food table. A mom of one of the guests was already putting pizza slices onto paper plates. Vinnie watched her awkwardly until Lisa walked past.
“The pizza’s already taken care of,” Vinnie said to his sister.
“Then hand out the baby carrots.”
“Carrots? Nobody’s gonna want carrots.”
“Then convince them they do.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Make them laugh. You can get kids to do anything if they’re laughing. Should be easy for you. I thought you were a comedian or something.”
“Not with kids. Or carrots. I haven’t even tasted a carrot since I was their age.”
“Just try.”
Vinnie muttered to himself as he picked up the untouched bowl full of carrots and walked toward the plastic kids’ table. Eight party guests sat around it. Vinnie decided he would first try his nephew.
“Hey Leo. Take some carrots,” urged Vinnie.
“No. I don’t like carrots,” replied Leo.
“Come on. They’re good for you.”
“No thanks.”
“How about the rest of you? Anyone want some carrots?” called Vinnie.
Kids shook their heads and covered their plates with their hands. Vinnie hated the idea of returning with a bowl full of carrots and listening to his sister say he had not even tried to give them away. He looked to see if anyone would notice if he dumped them under the table. That may have worked if the ground was covered in grass, but most of his sister’s yard was concrete. Vinnie also thought of the dog but she probably hated carrots as much as the kids. He had no choice but to get creative and trick the little partygoers into liking them, even if he felt like a hypocrite.
As Vinnie struggled for anything funny he might say, he had a flash of comedic inspiration. It was something he had only experienced two or three times in his life. Usually his material was borrowed or heavily influenced by other acts he heard, but this was all his own. Somehow he knew that using a funny voice would make the carrots irresistible.
Voice impressions were not usually Vinnie’s strength. He was not going for anything in particular, though, and he mostly wanted to sound weird. When he delivered his first, “Come on kids, get your carrots here!” it sounded a little like a mixture of Gollum from Lord of the Rings and Count Chocula, the cartoon vampire. Vinnie projected from deep in his diaphragm and exaggerated his raspy smoker’s voice. “Carrot Man is here and he wants you to eat your carrots!”
Vinnie half expected the kids to run away crying. Instead, they stared in surprise. His nephew was the first to uncover his plate and say he would try some of the carrots.
Vinnie dumped a handful of carrots next to his nephew’s pizza slices and said, “Oh yeah, yeah. Carrot Man delivering the good stuff.”
“I want some,” said one of the other kids.
Vinnie hurried over and dropped off more carrots. “Carrot Man to the rescue. Whenever you’re hungry for carrots, I’ll be there.”
Now everyone at the table wanted carrots. Vinnie kept going with the voice and circled the table handing out carrots. Most surprising to Vinnie was that the kids finished eating their carrots before their pizza. Vinnie returned the empty carrot bowl to his sister, smiling with satisfaction.
“What did you do?” she asked in a stunned voice.
“What can I say? Kids love me. I make them laugh.”
Leo and the rest of the kids quickly finished at the table and gathered around Vinnie. “Do the voice again! Do Carrot Man!” called Leo.
“Oh, you want more Carrot Man, huh?” replied Vinnie in the raspy voice. “But I’m out of carrots. What am I supposed to give you?”
“Play hide and seek!” shouted Leo.
For the next hour, until Lisa forced Leo to stop to open up his presents and eat cake and ice cream, Vinnie pretended to look for the kids around the backyard. There were very few possible hiding places, but Vinnie acted like he was mystified over where the kids could be. He used his Carrot Man voice and called out things like, “When I find you, I’m going to give you some carrots!”
Later that night, Vinnie got a call from Lisa. “I don’t know what it is, but Leo can’t stop talking about Carrot Man. You were his favorite part of his birthday.”
“I guess it was fun,” Vinnie admitted.
He was even more surprised when Lisa called the next day. “My friend Charlotte wants you at her son’s birthday party on Saturday. He was the boy sitting next to Leo. They want you to do Carrot Man again.”
“What? I’m not going to some stranger’s house and hanging out at a kids’ party.”
“She’ll pay you.”
“How much?”
Vinnie got $100 for 90 minutes as Carrot Man. Two days later, Lisa was on the phone again with another birthday party request. After his second $100 performance, Lisa called again with a third appointment.
“No, I’m not doing it anymore,” replied Vinnie. “It’s like I’m a clown for kids’ parties. I never wanted to be a clown. If someone saw me and came to one of my shows, they’d heckle me to death.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. No one goes to your shows.”
“Yeah, very funny.”
“Come on. This could be your big break. Kids love Carrot Man. You could make videos on YouTube and get famous. Everybody does it now. I know somebody who could help you.”
“No way. That’s crazy,” said Vinnie. He hung up.
Late that night, he was absentmindedly flipping through TV channels, but mostly thinking about Lisa’s ideas for Carrot Man. He began watching a documentary about the Cold War and falling in and out of sleep. At some point in the night, he became uncharacteristically terrified of death and his own mortality. He waited until noon the next day to frantically call his sister.
“Remember talking about my big break?” Vinnie asked in a shaky voice.
“The Carrot Man thing?”
“I figure most people are lucky to have one break in their whole lives.”
“Yeah.”
“And it may not be what you were planning on. It could be something completely out of the blue. Something weird. But you can’t throw it away.”
“Sure.”
“So I had this dream or vision or whatever. I was standing on one of those balconies the Russians use when their army is marching by. But instead of soldiers carrying guns, it was kids with carrots. I think it means something. Does that sound crazy?”
“Have you been taking psychedelic mushrooms? Are you high right now?”
“No. So do you really have someone that knows about that YouTube stuff?”
Two weeks later, Vinnie’s first Carrot Man video went up on YouTube. It was only ten seconds long and consisted of him holding a bowl of carrots and using the weird Carrot Man voice. He posted a new video to his channel every day and kept the message simple. He was not a successful comedian, but he could read an audience. He had seen what kids liked and that was what he called the three S’s: simple, silly, and stupid.
Vinnie was the only person in his videos and eventually they got longer than 10 seconds. In his Carrot Man voice, he talked about every aspect of about carrots he could think of, like where they were from and all their varieties. He mostly emphasized you should eat them. Then he branched out into other vegetables and how they compared to carrots. And then he came up with some stupid songs.
Before Carrot Man, Vinnie had only used social media to look for girls he had known from high school. But he got good at using all of the platforms to drive traffic to his videos. And word got around. His most popular songs got hundreds of thousands of views.
All of the material from Carrot Man’s YouTube channel made it easy to fill a 45-minute school assembly. He rolled through the elementary and middle schools in the Las Vegas area, charging $1000 a pop and preaching healthy eating. Then he was booked solid in Southern California and only got back to Las Vegas on the weekends.
Carrot Man was a hit with the Kindergarten through 6th grade crowd, but seventh and eighth graders were his true wheelhouse. It did not take much to work a middle school audience into a frenzy. He tossed carrots into the crowd and go them to shout out the songs with titles like “Carrots are the best food,” and “Hands off my carrots.” By the end, they were always chanting “Carrot Man! Carrot Man!” as Vinnie yelled into the microphone.
During his first year as Carrot Man, Vinnie resisted wearing any kind of costume. He dressed in casual slacks and stretchy shirts large enough to cover his round belly. Vinnie maintained that his popularity was all in the voice and the visuals did not matter. His sister kept pestering him and saying that he could do more and take it to the next level. Carrot Man needed to be an entire package.
Vinnie finally ordered an orange stretchy shirt customized with a green turtle-neck collar. He was mostly trying to get his sister to stop harassing him about it. When he tried it on, his first reaction was, “I look more like a pumpkin than a carrot.”
“Nah. It looks great! The kids are gonna love it!” Lisa assured him.
Carrot Man shirts and hats were soon available on the official merchandise website.
After two years of YouTube videos and school assemblies, it seemed almost inevitable that Vinnie would play his own live show in a large theater. His agent said he had plenty of options but he chose a 10,000 seat venue near one of the Las Vegas casinos. Sales were brisk as kids from Utah to California begged and pleaded with their parents to go.
Vinnie got his own dressing room where his sister, niece, and nephew made themselves at home.
“So you nervous, Mr. Bigshot?” Vinnie’s sister asked him.
“Not really. I’ve already done this at like a thousand schools. But it does feel pretty good to be here. It was always my dream, I just never thought I’d be doing it as the world’s fattest carrot.”
“It’s a lot more respectable than telling dirty jokes. You’re telling kids to eat healthy.”
“But I still don’t eat any vegetables, unless you count spaghetti sauce. I don’t like any of them, except maybe avocados.”
“I’m not sure that’s even a vegetable, Carrot Man.”
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