Why comedian Nigel Ng can't yet shake Uncle Roger

Enlarge this image

Comedian Nigel Ng at the Dream Downtown hotel in Manhattan April 11, 2022. Kholood Eid for NPR hide caption

Comedian Nigel Ng at the Dream Downtown hotel in Manhattan April 11, 2022.

You can tell by the way Uncle Roger is sitting how badly someone goofed. The popular YouTuber usually sits in his chair with one leg propped up on the seat, elbow resting on his knee. It's the ideal talking trash position for so many Asian uncles. It's kind of comfortable, somewhat relaxed, but loaded like a spring. So that when something truly wild happens – like say, Jamie Oliver uses soba noodles to make ramen – Uncle Roger can drop his leg and act like it's an affront to human decency, and give one of his signature "hiyas" to signal how much it hurts to see someone so famous for cooking mess up ramen so badly.

Throughout the pandemic, Uncle Roger has built an audience in the millions across platforms – 2 million on Facebook, 4 million on TikTok, 5 million on YouTube. They come for his roasting of mostly Western chefs botching Asian cooking, and defending the sanctity of woks and MSG.

The person behind Uncle Roger is London-based Malaysian stand-up Nigel Ng. He's currently in the middle of a huge world tour (his first headlining tour ever as a comic), driven by the massive popularity of Uncle Roger. Which he's grateful for. But he wants folks walking away from the shows thinking about Nigel.

YouTube

Ng's been grinding it out at open-mics, clubs, backs of bars, wherever, for over a decade. He's a former data scientist who quit his day job and committed to doing comedy full time in late 2019 – great comic timing. By 2020, the only outlet he had for his comedy was the podcast he co-hosted with his comedian friend Evelyn Mok, Rice to Meet You. One day they're riffing, and bouncing ideas off of each other, and coming up with characters. A couple were stinkers – the smutty late-night DJ was "too dirty for everyone," said Ng in an interview. Another miss was the right-wing Asian conspiracy theorist Nunchuck Jones. But the one with the most promise was the one least removed from reality.

"I started doing an Asian accent. And then with that accent I threw in some attitude to kind of mimic my older generation Asian uncles" said Ng. It's a familiar kind of Asian uncle. He's kind of a jerk, but a funny one. He talks a big game, but is loveable enough to call everyone niece and nephew. He's a bit of a cooking know-it-all, even though he's not out here in a kitchen day in and day out. The rest of the character developed from there. The name Roger is a nod to the type of Anglicized name that's a by-product of colonization in Malaysia (kind of like Nigel, come to think of it). And the look arose after Ng DM'ed all of his friends to text him pictures of their dads. So now, Uncle Roger always wears his signature orange polo (buttoned up to the top), with a huge phone case attached to his belt. When we met for this interview in the middle of four sold-out shows in New York City, I'd forgotten to ask if he wanted to bring his orange polo for the photo shoot. He brought it with him anyway.

Ng tried doing a few things with the Uncle Roger character, but what really popped off was reacting to a BBC video of presenter Hersha Patel making egg fried rice. A Rice to Meet You fan had sent it over, and Ng was going to do a react video to it anyway, but why not take this new bit on a test run? The BBC way of making egg fried rice, to put it gently, deviated from the norms of how an East Asian person might make egg fried rice. To Ng, it was hilariously bad and primo content for an Uncle Roger takedown. "Why you measure water with cup? Just use finger! Finger! You put rice, put water, until finger – first joint, the finger. That's how you measure the water. Not with British teacup. Hiyaaaaa." The clip went viral, and the video currently sits at over 29.5 million views on YouTube.

"Looking back on it, I realize I've combined three things that not many people have combined – the YouTube idiom 'the reaction video,' the character comedy and something relatable like food."

Ng took that formula and ran with it, and suddenly no food media personality was safe from Uncle Roger – from established Food Network alumni like Jamie Oliver (a favorite target of his), Rachel Ray, and Nigella Lawson, to newer stars on the scene like Matty Matheson and Joshua Weissman.