Matt Bellassai from “Whine About It” took the stage Monday evening in the Robert M. Smith Student Center to make audience members burst into laughter with his special comedy hour.
Bellassai is a writer, comedian and internet guru who many know from his weekly series on Buzzfeed called “Whine About It,” in which he got drunk at his work desk and complained about life.
He obtained this position on the Buzzfeed team after graduating from college seeking a job as a magazine writer in New York City.
When describing how he decided what path to take, Bellassai said that at one point, he thought it would be fun to make videos on Facebook and do what a YouTuber does.
Bellassai said, that the first video he ever created was absolutely awful, but it was something that he threw together and decided that he wanted to continue every week.
“It eventually became a thing that people actually noticed and talked about, and then I won a People’s Choice Award for it, so it worked out okay in the end,” Bellassai said as he laughed.
When deciding his next career step, Bellassai said he had to choose between staying under Buzzfeed’s umbrella or taking a risk and having the ability to work on whatever he wanted and own every project that he worked on.
He left Buzzfeed to branch off towards his own assignments.
“I decided to go out on my own and take the risk because I wanted to do stuff like this; visit colleges, do live shows and have the freedom to move around and work on other projects,” Bellassai said.
Senior secondary education social studies major and Director of Events for UPB, Ryan Logue is in charge of bringing speakers to campus. Logue said that he and his committee members reach out to different agents in the search for a speaker. The committee then narrows their list down and leaves it to the students to make the final decision on which speaker they want to see.
“For this speaker, we created a survey on paper and through Survey Monkey on social media, so with that, we tallied up all the votes and Matt Bellassai was the winner,” Logue said.
Logue admitted that he is a very big fan of Bellassai.
“This was my first time hearing of Matt, and then I started watching his videos from ‘Whine About It’ on Buzzfeed and he’s absolutely hilarious,” Logue said.
Bellassai revolved the night’s show around the reasons that he will be single forever. He listed ideas such as not wanting to share his food with a significant other, hating the idea of talking on the phone with someone, despising when his partner is sick and loathing the thought of eating food in front of someone.
“A lot of my humor is poking fun at myself and then it sort of becomes about everybody and I hope it’s relatable to everyone,” Bellassai said.
Bellassai said that he tends to choose everyday topics that people notice about themselves or what’s happening around them. He said that with live shows, he gets to be more energetic and angry and he feels that it is much more exciting live.
Bellassai hit the stage only in the last few months after people approached him to do live shows.
“It’s thrilling when you’re not in front of a camera because you know right away whether people like you or not and whether they’re laughing at you or not; well, laughing with you,” Bellassai said.
The speaker said that the message of his story was to get the point across that he considers himself a horrible person, but that he hopes the audience sees that he is not entirely awful and that he is good person aside from the humorous things and thoughts that he revealed about himself.
“I like making people laugh and entertaining people,” Bellassai said.
Logue said that he ultimately wanted people to enjoy themselves with finals week around the corner and stress levels being high. By making the tickets a dollar, Logue said that the show was available for everyone to go and enjoy themselves.
