Nigel Ng isn’t shy of speaking his mind. “I hope he didn’t say anything too controversial”, his publicist pleads after our interview. During a one-hour conversation he insults, mostly in jest, Middlesbrough, Minehead, British panel shows, the Edinburgh Fringe, British food, Chinese food in the UK, Wagamama, Butlins and Jamie Oliver.
The latter has become a comedy nemesis for Ng’s signature character, Uncle Roger. With tucked-in orange polo and belt phone case, Uncle Roger, a middle-aged former street-food vendor, reacts to YouTube videos of chefs cooking (usually very badly) Asian food. Lover of woks, rice cookers, pestle and mortars and MSG, Uncle Roger’s wrath has been reserved for Oliver, among others, on several occasions.
It started in 2020, when Uncle Roger reacted to a video of Oliver making egg-fried rice. There was a catalogue of errors: frying spring onions (wrong) in olive oil (very wrong); packet rice (“this guy own so many restaurant, and he still can’t be bothered to make his own rice”); and, the greatest crime, chilli jam. “You hear sizzling, I hear my ancestors crying,” goes a typical quote. It immediately blew up online.
Ng, 31, moved to London in 2015 after studying in Chicago and growing up in Malaysia. He spent a decade grinding on American and British comedy circuits while studying and then working in fintech. It was a struggle (particularly Butlins in Minehead), but in late 2019 he decided to go full time. “I joke about it now: right when that guy was about to eat that first bat, I went full time,” says Ng. “Terrible timing.”
That’s when Uncle Roger was born. Ng was riffing ideas with fellow comedian Evelyn Mok on their Rice to Meet You podcast, and this one stuck. Listeners loved it. With mannerisms picked up from the kopitiams, or coffee shops, of Malaysia, and crude humour, Ng took the character online.
He released the first YouTube video in July 2020. Reacting to a BBC Food recipe presented by actress Hersha Patel, Roger gasps at everything from draining rice in a colander (“This is not pasta. If you’re rice too wet, you f***ed up”) to a lack of MSG. To date it has over 30 million views.
It kicked off what Ng calls the “egg-fried rice trilogy”. In the space of a few weeks he reacted to Patel, Oliver and a third by Gordon Ramsay, introducing catchphrases like ‘haiya’, a Chinese term connoting anger, sadness and despair, and ‘fuiyoh’, roughly the opposite.
While Patel’s egg-fried rice was “bad”, Oliver’s was worse. “Jamie should know better, he’s a professional chef,” says Ng, who says Oliver’s team has seen the videos. There have reportedly been “mixed reactions”.
Is he wary of taking on such big names? “You can’t have fear as a comic, or you just end up doing very boring comedy. I don’t work in the food world, I’m not trying to be a celebrity chef, so I’ll burn that bridge.” But he’s willing to build it, too: “Jamie, if you read the Telegraph, let’s do a video together,”.
Ramsay impressed Uncle Roger by using two woks, and generally nailed his nasi goreng, an Indonesian fried rice. “He’s messed up other stuff since,” Ng jokes. “He loved it when I roasted him in his ramen video.” The pair have subsequently met and a joint TV travelogue is in the works.
Since Uncle Roger’s first video, Ng has amassed hundreds of millions of views across social media and his online presence has skyrocketed from 40,000 Instagram followers to 1.7 million today, and from 7,000 YouTube subscribers to 5.8 million, recently overtaking none other than, you guessed it, Jamie Oliver. It is arguably the pandemic success story of the online food world.
Why has it been so successful? For Ng, the mix of roast (insult) comedy – a key tenet of his own stand-up – with reaction videos and a comedy character, not to mention a relatable topic like food, is unique. It is also universal, attracting fans in the West and all over Asia.
Yet with fame has come controversy. Patel received death threats after Uncle Roger’s brutal takedown. “That’s the nature of the internet, but I definitely felt bad,” says Ng. “She didn’t ask for it, and I didn’t expect the video to get so many views.” The two later met and made a video together. “Now she’s so loved,” says Ng.
There was an online storm involving China, with Ng posting a video on Chinese social media with, unbeknownst to him at the time, an anti-Chinese food blogger. Ng removed the video, only to be accused of being a Community Party apologist. He now says he prefers to stay out of politics.
There have been complaints from food writers like J. Kenji López-Alt that Ng pushes stereotypes, particularly regarding Uncle Roger’s accent, which Ng describes as similar to how he spoke as a child, with a touch more Hong Kong Cantonese. “If a white guy puts on yellowface and does an accent, sure, that’s pretty bad,” says Ng. “But I sounded more like Uncle Roger growing up than how I sound now. What is Uncle Roger supposed to sound like? He’s not American, you know. Everything I say is lifting Asian people up. I’m talking about our food with pride.”
Which brings us to the crux of Uncle Roger’s videos. While Ng insists the primary motive is humour, it’s also a manner of addressing one of the key issues of our age, cultural appropriation. Not that Uncle Roger would use that term. “The day I say the words ‘cultural appropriation’ on stage, just shoot me. Comedy needs to be fun, it can’t sound like a lecture. I think a lot of Edinburgh Fringe comedians need to realise that.”
Still, Uncle Roger – and Ng – are keen on tradition. Addressing Oliver’s chilli-jam-in-egg-fried-rice debacle, Ng says: “It’s a pet peeve of mine that he would never do that with French cooking. He would have more respect. But Asian cooking? Anything goes, just whack it in there.”
Ng continues: “Let’s start from the character’s perspective. Uncle Roger is 51, he’s stuck in his ways. Of course he’s going to lean traditional when it comes to preparing Asian food. There are ways to tweak Asian dishes to fit the contemporary Western palate without ruining it, [but] there needs to be a logic behind it. If you put chilli jam into rice as opposed to a shrimp paste or sambal, that’s completely wrong, the flavour profiles are all different. Chilli jam has sugar, it’s going to burn in a hot pan.”
Like Uncle Roger, Ng doesn’t shy away from speaking his mind. Aside from a few places, he rails against most Asian food in the UK, particularly the Wagamama chain. “Don’t ever eat there. I’m surprised the pandemic didn’t kill them off,” he jokes. “If you marry someone and your mother-in-law’s from Surrey, ok, bring them there, you don’t want to scare them away.”
After his flirtation with being cancelled during the China furore, does Ng worry it could happen again? He points to the comedian Dave Chappelle, who despite accusations of transphobia is selling out the Hollywood Bowl and making hundreds of millions from Netflix shows. “If that’s being cancelled, cancel me please. If you are funny enough, you’re uncancelable.”(Chappelle was this week attacked while on stage at the Hollywood Bowl.)
Currently in the midst of a global tour, Ng kicks off each night with a 20-minute Uncle Roger set before returning as himself, or ‘Nephew Nigel’. The two have similarities, particularly a love for roasting their fans, and Ng says he also prefers the food he grew up with cooked “the traditional way”.
But does he fear being better known for his character than himself? “You’ve got to give people a bit of what they want. I’m still so grateful for it. Most creative types work our asses off to get that one break, and for a lot of people it doesn’t come. So the fact that this thing happened, I’m very proud and grateful.”
Nigel Ng is playing the Eventim Apollo in London on February 2 2023
