Nigel Ng’s comedy career skyrocketed under lockdown, when his Uncle Roger persona, policing other people’s Asian cookery for laughs, went viral on YouTube. A fair few of his five million subscribers will form the audience to the 30-year-old’s current tour, and Ng doesn’t scruple to give them exactly what they want. Jokes about rice, jokes about inadequate British cooking, jokes that – no matter how they begin – tend inexorably towards generalisations about east Asian behaviour.
Fair enough: we’re not exactly oversaturated with Asian immigrant perspectives on life in the UK. And many of Ng’s are amusing enough. In character as Uncle Roger, he takes down Boots-branded sushi and western food allergies. As himself (which is pretty much Roger minus the exaggerated accent) he contrasts British versus Asian dating and British versus Asian child discipline, a routine that founders on an over-attenuated gag about John Lewis’s returns policy.
