Ellington

About a dozen people mingle by the bar at JJ’s Bohemia in downtown Chattanooga.

It’s a Tuesday night and rain pours outside. The 20- to 30-somethings order $1 beers, a special tonight. Some knock back Pabst Blue Ribbon in a tall white can while others tilt clear pint glasses of draft beer to their lips.

Joel Ruiz is perched on a barstool. His longish dark-red hair shakes as he laughs at the comic on stage. He’s slouching forward; ready to take his turn at the microphone a few feet away. This is a scene he’s building with the help of friends Andy Pyburn and John-Michael Bond. They’re all local comics who tell somewhat embellished personal stories to groups of strangers slowly becoming fans each week at different spots in the Scenic City.

On stage between acts, Ruiz rouses the bar crowd to clap it up for the last comic while he gets a chance to share some of his routine. “I used to weigh about 170 pounds. I went to the doctor’s office recently and stepped on the scale and I weighed 209,” he says. He turned to the nurse and said, “Wait, are you sure? I still have my shoes on?”“She said unless you’re keeping all of your fat in your shoes I think you’ll still be 209 there tubby,” he says.

The $1 beer crowd laughs and those laughs are all it takes to keep Ruiz coming back. What Ruiz and his friends are doing definitely isn’t mainstream but their performances have built a small following at JJ’s and The Office, a small bar connected to City Café downtown. Credit for the growing local underground comedy scene goes mostly to Ruiz, who used to book musical acts around town before falling in love with the craft. “Joel’s an incredible promoter,” fellow comic Bond says.

Ruiz uses Chattanooga’s location, halfway between Atlanta and both Nashville and Knoxville, to draw in headline acts for one-night performances between shows in bigger markets. Comedy Central-level acts such as Kyle Kinane, Louis Katz, Joe DeRosa, Jackie Kashian, Nate Bargatze, Doug Stanhope and others have hit Chattanooga because Ruiz called them.

Growing up the youngest of three brothers taught Ruiz a valuable lesson — if you don’t want to get picked on, be the butt of your own joke. So he tells stories about how he’s getting fat, or about his job as a line cook at the local bar Hair of the Dog.

His first performance is on YouTube.com. Like most of his comedy it’s not workplace friendly. “When I first started I did really dirty, raunchy material,” the 24-year-old Ruiz says. “As I’ve gone on I try to do something where the dirty isn’t the joke.”

He grew up watching the sitcom “Seinfeld” and hopes to move to New York one day to do standup and write for a sitcom. Friends who ran the downtown Chattanooga Billiard Club open mic comedy show gave him his first shot at comedy, calling on a Sunday night to tell him that he’d perform the next Friday and to have 7 minutes of material ready. “No one just wakes up and says ‘I want to do standup,’” Ruiz says.

It might take a good comic a year to build a 20-minute routine. But 21 years of defensive comedy among his family and friends had given him joke fodder. So for that whole week he wrote out jokes, stood in his room pretending a remote control was a microphone and reading aloud maybe 30 times. He brought the notes with him on stage. “I felt like I had to pee,” he remembers. “I was shaking and nervous.”

The crowd of about 60 people loved it. “So I got to do one show and it was a super high and I was like, ‘Yeah comedy is awesome.’” That early confidence proved painful on the next go-round. “I thought, well I did so good last time I’m going to write a whole new set of jokes,” he says. He also calmed his nerves with a few too many tequila drinks.

“As soon as I got up on stage I was like ‘I am very hammered and this is not going to go well,’” he says. And it didn’t; he bombed. Thankfully, he says, that is not online. But, Ruiz says, that experience combined with watching local friends who’d performed in bigger cities taught him that being really funny is serious work.

So he records performances, dissecting what went wrong and why. He meets with Pyburn, Bond and other comics to workshop material almost every week. The trio has put two series of online sketch comedy shows online — “Natural 20s” and “Back of the House.”

Bond has known Ruiz for years and started doing his own standup after watching a few of his shows. “He’s going through a transitional stage right now,” Bond says. “He was really good at saying something that made the audience cringe. It’s still shocking but that’s just because Joel’s mentality is shocking.”

Matt Ward also is building an alternative comedy scene in Knoxville and says Ruiz has the right idea. “Stage time is the name of the game,” he says. “You want to have stage time in your hometown or you’re in the wrong town.”

By booking a lot of the acts, Ruiz brings in talent and then gets to host or perform with that talent. The method helps him network with out-of-towners and get some exposure for his routine, Ward says. Ruiz is finalizing details of a two-week tour in early February, his longest road stint so far. He, Zach Ames, Jon Durnell and Tess Barker plan to perform in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio. He hopes to meet new comics, get exposure and see if he likes life on the road. "Also it is a good chance to work on new material, two straight weeks with a show every night,” Ruiz adds.

Ryan Darling performed his first standup routine at The Office in November. He’d approached Ruiz about trying it out after going to many of the local shows. Formerly in a band, Darling recognizes the effort it takes to build a following in a mid-sized city like Chattanooga. “His work ethic as far as what he’s doing in the comedy scene, it’s out of this world,” Darling says.