RIFY
Opinion Editor
Alex DeAngelis films a short comedy skit. Photo by ALEX DEANGELIS| Special to The Leader
A new social media star is now in our midst.
Going by the alias ChillinHotDog, he has amassed hundreds of thousands of views on Instagram and TikTok with comedy skits, tackling anything from college squirrels to wacky hijinks that only he could fathom.
I had the opportunity to interview this rising star and show how his humble beginnings brought him to where he is today.
His real name is Alex DeAngelis, a 19-year-old environmental science major who focuses on what he describes as “outdoor stuff.”
His username came from when he was younger. He recounted the story of two shirts he owned as a child.
One of them was a graphic of an ice cube and a glass of water, which said, “Just Chilling.” The other shirt was of a burger and a hot dog, with the burger saying, “What’s up, Dog?” to the hot dog.
In one of his first strokes of creative genius, he combined the two shirts, coming up with the name “ChillinHotDog.”
This was his username on everything, from gamertags to his Twitch, which he still has today. This leads us to his username for his comedy-centered page we know and love.
His bio on Instagram is “These frogs be jumping.”
He cites two things for this bio. For one, frogs are his favorite animal. For two, he told me, “Recently, I worked landscaping over the summer at my old high school.” He continued, “Actually, one of my first videos that I posted was me yapping in my car about how toads are always jumping into the weed whackers or jumping into the lawnmowers as I’m going.”
So, in retrospect, those frogs did be jumping.
While the demise of these frogs was not intentional, the creation of his now-famous social media account was, and he started to create short-form skits.
The blowing up of his account was a surprise to him, with him saying, “I was kind of shocked because I think the first video that kind of got some traction was, like, I made [it] at my house and the video was something about college,” DeAngelis mentioned.
He continued by telling me how he kept making videos, specifically ones that were not about college. After a while of making content that wasn’t about college life, he returned to his older videos about college and realized, “Wait, that one kind of went crazy, I should probably try to make some more.”
So, he did. And when he did, he started gaining serious traction, to the point where he was getting thousands, hundreds of thousands, and up to a million views on his videos.
He told me that his newfound fame came as a surprise to him, “I was shocked at first because I didn’t think that something like that would happen to me at least.”
ChillinHotDog has now amassed a widespread following, with his most popular video having 8 million views on Instagram.
Having a giant fanbase both here and outside of Fredonia, Alex uses comedy to connect people through shared experiences, and that is a great thing.