The YouTube hit is the brainchild of stand up comic Nigel Ng, who's in the middle of a world tour. But can he stand out beyond his character?

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Egg fried rice is considered simple to make. The ingredients are in the name. You want some day-old rice. You want some eggs. You need a wok to cook with. If you're a celebrity chef, like, say, Jamie Oliver, you better get those little details right, though, because Uncle Roger may come after you, as in this YouTube clip.

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)

JAMIE OLIVER: Egg fried rice - it's an absolute classic. And I've got...

NIGEL NG: (As Uncle Roger) Two seconds into video, and I already see saucepan. Hi-ya. Where your wok? Jamie, where your wok? Egg fried rice...

INSKEEP: The Uncle Roger character is a YouTube star with millions of followers. And he was created by a Malaysian comic, Nigel Ng, who's on the North American leg of a world tour. NPR's Andrew Limbong caught up with him.

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Nigel Ng has been grinding it out as a stand-up for over a decade now.

NG: Clubs...

LIMBONG: Open mikes, right?

NG: ...Back room of bars...

LIMBONG: Yeah.

NG: ...Open mikes, everywhere.

LIMBONG: He quit his day job and committed to doing stand-up full time in late 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and he's at home in London hosting a podcast called "Rice To Meet You" with his comedian friend Evelyn Mok. One day they're riffing, bouncing ideas off of each other.

NG: I started doing an Asian accent. And then with the accent, I threw in some attitude there as well to kind of mimic my older-generation Asian uncles.

LIMBONG: The kind of uncle that's always talking trash and smoking cigarettes and maybe still owes your mom some money, but a lovable uncle who refers to everyone as Niece or Nephew - the name Roger is a nod to the type of Anglicized name that's a byproduct of colonization in Malaysia - kind of like Nigel, actually. And as for his look...

NG: I DMed all my friends, said send me a picture of your dad.

LIMBONG: So now Uncle Roger always wears an orange polo tucked in, huge phone case attached to his belt. As for the content, he tried a couple of different things, but what really popped off was this.

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)

NG: Hello. My name is Uncle Roger. Today I will react to a video sent to me by a fan.

LIMBONG: A BBC video of presenter Hersha Patel making egg fried rice, which, let's say, deviated from the norms of how an Eastern Asian person might make egg fried rice.

NG: Like, it was hilariously bad.

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)

HERSHA PATEL: For every one part rice you have, you need two parts water. It's as simple as that.

NG: (As Uncle Roger) Who - why you measure water with cup? Just use finger - first joint of finger. That's how you measure the water, not with British tea cup. Hi-ya. First step...

NG: And it just blew up from there.

LIMBONG: The video currently has 29 million views on YouTube.

NG: Looking back, now I realize I've combined three things that, you know, not many people have combined those things in - you know, the YouTube idiom, the reaction video, the character comedy and then a relatable thing, like food.

LIMBONG: Ng took that formula and ran with it, reacting to other Western chefs botching Asian cooking - folks like Gordon Ramsay, Rachael Ray, Nigella Lawson. And he'll hammer on repeated themes that Western chefs constantly get wrong about Asian cooking.

Here's Jenny Lau. She runs Celestial Peach, which is a platform dedicated to telling the story of Chinese food.

JENNY LAU: I think one of the things that he's sort of obviously taken on is this demystification of MSG.

LIMBONG: Which actually isn't that bad for you and is found naturally in all sorts of foods, like tomatoes and cheeses.

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)

NG: Where your MSG? You don't use MSG, how to make good egg fried rice? This is just white people egg fried rice.

LAU: Although a lot of, you know, other sort of food voices have tried to educate on this, I think the fact that Nigel does it in a really funny way - that's quite a smart way to do it.

LIMBONG: And Uncle Roger gets to both educate and complain about cultural appropriation without coming off as what Lau referred to as a boba liberal. But now we got to talk about the accent. The common critiques thrown at Ng about it is that it's stereotypical. It makes Asians look bad. The celebrated chef, cookbook author and fellow food YouTuber J. Kenji Lopez-Alt wrote in the description of his own egg fried rice video that, quote, "it's ugly. It's yellowface. It's not funny. And it promotes anti-Asian racism at a time when Asians are already being heavily discriminated against." Lopez-Alt declined to talk to me. But even Jenny Lau expressed some initial discomfort with the shtick, as did Brian Tsao chef at Mission Sandwich Social in Brooklyn, which opens later this year.

BRIAN TSAO: Because I was like, you know, should I be supporting this? Is this pushing forward, you know, a stereotype that I don't really want out there for the rest of the world to judge us based on?

LIMBONG: Tsao's also got his own YouTube react channel about food and cooking. And for him, a light sort of switched when he realized that these Western chefs Uncle Roger was reacting to were giving Asian cooking a bad reputation.

TSAO: And Uncle Roger calls out the [expletive] in the exact accent that is meant to demean us. So in many ways, like, I feel like it's empowering.

LIMBONG: For Ng, this debate crystallizes the difference between being Asian American or East Asian in the U.K. and just being Asian.

NG: We grew up very differently, right? I grew up in Malaysia. And when a friend puts on that accent, it means they are being friendly. They're trying to be funny. And it - for a lot of Malaysians, I mean, you hear that, and people come up to me after show saying that when I hear the accent, it reminds me of home. And to me, that - it reminds me of home, too, 'cause that's how we talk to each other when we let our guards down.

(APPLAUSE)

LIMBONG: Of course, folks in the Asian diaspora have their guards up for a reason.

NG: I got punched, man, in London. This is real.

LIMBONG: I caught Ng recently at one of his four sold-out shows at the Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan. The crowd was mostly Asian, but not all. And he did a few minutes of material based on being attacked right as Uncle Roger was getting famous.

NG: I was walking on my street. I was almost home, right? And this guy was on a bicycle. He saw me. He jumped off his bike and just walked towards me really aggressively. And at first, I thought he wanted a photo.

(LAUGHTER)

NG: I said, hey, it's a Nephew. Then...

(SOUNDBITE OF MIC THUMPING)

LIMBONG: He came out relatively unscathed.

NG: The worst thing about getting punched is when the police show up at your house, they don't take their [expletive] shoes off.

LIMBONG: Ng is in an interesting place as a comedian. Both because of the pandemic and the rise of Uncle Roger, his first-ever tour as a headliner is this huge one he's in the middle of right now. And he wants people to walk away thinking about Nigel as a stand-up. But he still has to put on that orange polo and open his show as Uncle Roger because that's what people want to see - like an orange polo albatross around his neck. I asked him if he's thinking about retiring the Uncle Roger character, at least live.

NG: It would be nice. It means I would work less, you know? I don't - one, I don't have to carry extra orange polos around, although I kind of want to get a T-shirt gun to - might, like, show the T-shirt cannon to launch orange polos into the crowd.

LIMBONG: Because he's here to sell tickets - and he said at the end of the day, Uncle Roger and Nephew Nigel share the same bank account.

Andrew Limbong, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF HIP HOP BEATS'S "GYM IS LIFE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.