Explore how online platforms turn culture into content, framing Uncle Roger’s humour—and whether audiences laugh with it or at it.
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28 Jan 2026
6 Min Read
Soon Sue Qii (Student Writer), Nellie Chan (Editor)
Explore how online platforms turn culture into content, framing Uncle Roger’s humour—and whether audiences laugh with it or at it.
In today’s digital landscape, it’s not unusual to find yourself three hours deep into a doomscroll, moving through a steady stream of ASMR clips, fun-fact shorts, reaction videos, and other algorithmically curated distractions. Among them, comedy skits have become some of the most persistent stops in that flow. And somewhere between over-the-top Asian accents, well-worn tiger-parent jokes, and the ever-present threat of a flying slipper, one figure stands out: a man in an orange polo, better known to the internet as Uncle Roger.
To his many ‘nieces’ and ‘nephews,’ Uncle Roger feels instantly recognisable—funny, familiar, even validating. Yet behind his punchlines lies a quieter question about how audiences engage with Asian culture online: when they laugh, are they laughing with it, or at it?
Before Uncle Roger became a viral sensation, Nigel Ng was already carving out a career in comedy. A Malaysian-born stand-up, Ng began performing while at university and later worked the comedy circuit in the United States and the United Kingdom. He made his television debut on Stand Up Central, Comedy Central UK in 2018, honing a style of observational humour informed by his multicultural experiences—including life in Malaysia and the tensions of navigating diasporic spaces.
His breakthrough came in 2020 with a reaction video that introduced the world to his alter ego, Uncle Roger, critiquing a BBC Food segment on egg fried rice. In the video, Ng adopts a performative persona, complete with a heightened Cantonese accent and exaggerated gestures, skewering what he sees as missteps in the cooking process—most memorably, the decision to rinse cooked rice, which drew reactions from those versed in conventional Chinese cooking methods. The video quickly went viral, amassing tens of millions of views and attracting viewers from across the globe.
Both Asian and non-Asian audiences found appeal in the video, though for different reasons. Those within Asian communities recognised the cultural cues and laughed along with the critique, while those outside them saw it as an entry point into Chinese culinary culture through comedy. Catchphrases like fuiyoh, walao, and haiyaa caught on, letting audiences feel ‘in on the joke’ even without full cultural context. For a moment, Uncle Roger seemed to bridge cultural gaps. Threaded through the performance, however, were the early hints of cultural commodification: accents, gestures, and catchphrases distilled into symbols that made the character widely scalable—the force behind his meteoric rise and the shadow over what followed.
Uncle Roger didn’t simply materialise from the internet aether; his rise was propelled by a media economy already captivated by Asian culture—an economy fuelled by accessibility, aesthetic appeal, and digital virality. From food trends like the viral two‑ingredient Japanese cheesecake to beauty fads like ‘douyin makeup’ and entertainment hits like Netflix’s animated KPop Demon Hunters, global audiences were primed to immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, and styles of the region. It is within this scene that Uncle Roger enters fully formed: a character perfectly attuned to the patterns shaping online engagement.
Uncle Roger’s resonance pulses first and foremost through accessibility. Engaging with Asian culture carries a relatively low barrier, as audiences are accustomed to interacting with it at a surface level, and he fits seamlessly into this space. His persona plates up food as a universal conduit, serving critique with humour rather than a lecture. Viewers don’t need prior culinary knowledge to laugh; they can appreciate the joke and relate to his reactions, in sync with the rhythm of his performance. In this way, accessibility prioritises the emotional over the educational—a shortcut to cultural participation.
Aesthetic appeal further amplifies this resonance. Platforms reward content that can be taken in at a glance, and Uncle Roger is precision-coded for instant recognition. The bright orange polo and the propped-up leg stage his persona visually, while the accent and cadence of his catchphrases carry it vocally. Even his gestures—from incredulous head shakes to prolonged pauses and dramatic displays of disappointment—land the joke before a word is spoken. Together, these visual, vocal, and behavioural cues translate the character into a form that can be consumed out of context, reposted, or remixed without losing its punch. In this economy, Uncle Roger becomes iconic.
Digital virality sets that resonance in motion. Reaction content dominates short-form platforms, and Uncle Roger’s videos follow a formula: he responds to viral content, and his reactions unfold in predictable beats that audiences can anticipate. This operates according to platform incentives: familiarity increases shareability, repetition reinforces recognition, and exaggeration reaches further than nuance. Each new video feels both fresh and familiar, creating a feedback loop in which performance, platform, and audience converge, making Uncle Roger as much a product of this economy as a producer within it.
But resonance rarely remains neutral. It can compress identity, commodify culture, and condition both audience perception and creator opportunity. Uncle Roger’s trajectory traces the tension between performance and platform: an economy that rewards repeatable spectacle often does so at the expense of authenticity, nuance, and community.
Even as his fame skyrocketed, the very formula that launched it began to show its limits. Reaction content depends on repetition, and his videos increasingly leaned on predictable beats: a furrowed brow, a drawn-out walao, and a crude punchline punctuated by music. As the novelty of critiquing food content waned and fresh targets grew scarce, each new video felt recycled. The pressure to post nearly daily for an audience of millions compounded the problem, pushing content into a production line. What started as sharp, culturally informed humour gradually hardened into a template—one optimised for clicks and circulation rather than nuance.
The side effects of this formula extend beyond creative fatigue. While Uncle Roger’s comic voice initially drew on elements of his Cantonese Malaysian background, the character’s accent and speech patterns have occasionally been critiqued as stylised or stereotype‑evoking rather than representative of any single linguistic community. And as audiences grew more global, content became packaged for mass consumption, trading authenticity for palatability. Collaborations with smaller Asian creators gave way to appearances alongside bigger, high-profile figures, signaling a shift from community-building towards monetisable exposure. In this economy, identity is commodified, flattened to symbols that are recognisable, repeatable, and shareable.
Their reverberations ripple outwards from Uncle Roger. Fans who had once valued his culturally informed humour felt sidelined as the content no longer embodied the specificity that first resonated with them. Meanwhile, new audiences encountered a pared-down version of the persona, often interpreted as a simplified or stereotype‑linked vision of Asian identity. The formula’s dominance also sets implicit expectations for other creators: emerging Asian comedians may feel pressured to accentuate identity markers or rely on stereotype‑anchored performance to gain visibility. Over time, this echo chamber narrows the perception of what ‘Asian comedy’ can be, privileging content that is easily digestible and immediately legible to mainstream audiences over complexity, experimentation, or community-rooted expression.
Perhaps the issue was never one comedian alone, but a media economy that rewards repetition over reflection, caricature over culture, and virality over originality. Comedy doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it emerges from what creators choose to produce, what platforms choose to promote, and what industries choose to market. When content is formulated from the same narrow depictions, it systematically normalises which identities are rewarded when performed.
The question, then, is not whether Asian comedy deserves space, but what kind of space we’re willing to make for it—and whether, when we laugh, we’re laughing with culture, or at a version of it sold for laughs.
Soon Sue Qii is currently pursuing a Foundation in Arts at Taylor’s College. She seeks to offer thoughtful commentary on topics contributing to discourse within her generation, while exploring the evolving landscape of contemporary journalism.
