Cam Folker uses the comedy stage to talk about his colorful past and his diverse family tree.
His upbringing comes with stories of running away, arrests and even a high-speed chase when he was just 14 years old. His troubles became so severe that he had to move out of Utah.
These painful stories are recounted into the microphone.
"But in a funny way," the Kaysville man says. "The biggest thing that I just really like, sometimes it takes a minute to get there, is really that I turned my life around. I liked being in trouble because I didn't want to be home. So I grew up in juvenile detention centers."
He also likes to showcase his large, diverse family. He has a grandmother from Japan and another from Sweden.
"America is kind of a melting pot. So that's my thing that I have found everywhere I have traveled," Folker said. "There is so many cultures and there's this big gap of miscommunication and misunderstandings. So I have always kind of banked on that."
He talks, for example, about drawing the ire of his Japanese grandmother for having tattoos, something that doesn't sit well with those from "old-school Japan." His grandmother tells others about his tattoos as if she is telling them he has cancer.
" 'These tattoos mean something to me, Grandma' " Folker says and then goes into a heavy Japanese accent, " 'They mean something to me too. Naughty, naughty.' "
Folker discovered early on that he needed to have characters in the jokes.
"If you just stand up there and talk, it's hard to keep people's attention. I am just naturally animated," Folker said. "But I have also found ... people pay a lot more attention to you if you do something just out of the norm."
He always had a natural ability to do impressions. He could watch "Sesame Street" and copy the muppets.
The impressions bleed over into his family and now join him onstage.
Coming home
Folker spent most of his young adult life in Colorado.
But it was the tragic loss of his 17-year-old sister in a car crash that finally brought him back to Utah.
He decided then that he needed to choose a path in life, so he went to technical school to become a sound engineer.
Folker started touring with several bands, Tom Petty and Sheryl Crow among them. But it was touring with a country band, the Kelly J. Band, that changed his career.
He became known around the musicians for his funny family stories. One night, the band was scheduled to play in a bar that had a rodeo going on nearby. The lead singer, Kelly J., wanted to finish watching the rodeo and told Folker to go tell some stories to buy her time.
"She said, 'If you don't do it, you are going to have to find your own way home,' " Folker said.
He got up, told some stories about his grandmothers, and walked off the stage to laughter and a new direction.
He has spent a decade on the comedy circuit.
"I just always liked to make people laugh. That's why I do it now. That's what I am."