Malaysian comedian behind viral Uncle Roger video on YouTube ‘super grateful’ people love his work

Nigel Ng’s viral reaction video to a guide on how to make egg fried rice has more than 11.6 million views, and his channel has 903,000 subscribers

Ng, who attributes the video’s popularity to the ubiquity of rice, has performed on TV, co-hosts a podcast and is working on a comedy pilot for BBC Radio 4

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Nigel Ng, aka Uncle Roger, now has 903,000 subscribers on YouTube – weeks earlier, before his viral video reacting to a BBC video about how to cook rice, he had 9,000.

Published: 7:45am, 25 Aug 2020Updated: 11:06am, 20 Oct 2020

More than 11.6 million YouTube views can’t be wrong. That’s how many people have watched a comedy sketch posted in July by Malaysian stand-up comedian Nigel Ng.

“It’s been a crazy month,” Ng tells the Post from his London home. “I’m not complaining. I feel really lucky to get this type of success. People say this virality is the result of hard work, but it’s also a lot of luck. I’m just super grateful.”

Ng, 29, appears in the video as Uncle Roger, his outraged and outrageously funny alter ego. He offers a blow-by-blow commentary on a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) video guide to preparing egg fried rice. The unfortunate chef, Hersha Patel, is mocked with a variety of exclamations and gestures that range from disapproval to disbelief.

Patel’s culinary crimes include: measuring the water with a “British” tea cup instead of her finger; failing to wash the rice and – worst of all; draining the cooked rice with a colander. Cue the meme-busting cry: “You killing me woman! She’s draining rice with colander!”

The video, Uncle Roger DISGUSTED by this Egg Fried Rice Video (BBC Food), went viral. “It blew up through Twitter, Reddit, and [Facebook group] Subtle Asian Traits. Then newspapers started picking it up. Then, people started making the memes,” Ng says.

The result is that both Ng and Uncle Roger – a stereotypical middle-aged Malaysian “uncle” – have enjoyed the sort of success that normally takes comedians years to achieve. Ng has been performing stand-up since 2011, although he only went full-time last year.