"You want the tour?" he says, friendly, but with the unspoken acknowledgement that it's slightly weird to be walking a perfect stranger through your house. That's another thing about him, something that differentiates Scott from Carrot Top. Carrot Top would be running through the place, laughing and opening drawers that rubber snakes and ping-pong balls would pop out of.

But Scott 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 in Winter Park, 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.

The house is in a suburban, non-gated neighborhood, although there is a gate around it, leading to a fountain and a large sliding glass door that opens onto a tiled foyer leading to his-and-her bedrooms suites and another shaded courtyard where Thompson has his morning coffee. Walk around from the courtyard, and there's a small designer-looking pool surrounded by a privacy wall.

It could be in Wellington. It's very grown-up, which seems appropriate for an almost 40-year-old man, but kind of funny for a guy sketching Britney Spears props in his kitchen.

"I always feel like 'I have to go before the real owner gets here!' " he says, his voice rising, as it occasionally does, to its familiar higher Carrot Top register.

Here's a strange but true fact. The house, decorated with ethnic vases, plush furniture and not one goofy hat, was made out of material left over from Celine Dion's house. Apparently the same builder that created Dion's 10,000-square-foot manse where the former Jupiter resident lives while doing her show at Caesar's Palace, later built this one, Thompson says.

It was already done when he bought it, so it's just a weird coincidence. But then, in the weird six degrees of separation that the rest of us imagine bind everyone more famous than us, it seems to make sense.

Go get something, it's decided, and so everybody piles into Thompson's ginormous black Hummer — Jeff drives, and Thompson slides into the back seat, his red curls shaking slightly at the motion.

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. Scott, for his part, was the admitted class clown.

And that's one of the reasons he works so hard on his act. His gags are constantly changing to keep up with the water-cooler talk, the cues people will get immediately because they're on our minds.

As he peruses the menu at a barbecue restaurant, and snacks on a shared order of cheesy bread, a waiter comes over to suggest a healthy entree. It's apparent, of course, that the crazily muscular guy across the table is no longer the skinny Wendy's girl look-alike that popped on the scene in the early 1990s.

So, is this one of those things you hear about on Oprah, where a celebrity admits to changing themselves to distance themselves from the dorkiness of their past?

There may be haters, but there are also plenty of fans. A few days after this lunch, Thompson made his 25th Tonight Show appearance since 1993. His Luxor show is a regular sell-out. And he attracts a lot of attention, even in an anything-goes place like Las Vegas.

He gets a double take from the guy in the Mercedes waiting to turn left at the median next to the Hummer; the waitress at the barbecue place opens her eyes wide, and then not-so-subtly asks if he'd like to be seated in the back.

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.

He smiles, gives a hug, and steps into the house to go do just that for a couple of hours, before Carrot Top and his trunks hit the Luxor again.

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