Uncle Roger’s Rice-Gate goes viral: The comedy of cultural mis-appropriation

People all around the world make rice. It is a staple in many people’s diets. But do you know how to cook it? Chances are, if you are outside of East Asia, you are doing it wrong. At least according to Uncle Roger, who has made it his comedic quest to confront British cooking celebrities. The focus? The egregious preparation rice and egg fried rice. The stakes? The sullied reputation of Chinese culture.     

Uncle Roger the savvy middle-aged Chinese uncle

“Hallo niece and nephew”. The middle aged Chinese Uncle Roger eschews the standard cheerful vlogger greeting of “Hey Guys!” and already creates a comedic space separate from reality. Nigel Ng, the creator of Uncle Roger, describes the persona  as “The sassy, condescending uncle who complains about everything, but ultimately is funny and nice” (Kidd, 2020).

But make no mistake, Uncle Roger is as savvy as a millennial Youtuber. His breakout viral Youtube video attracted more than 13 million views in just over a month and brandishes the provocative title, “Uncle Roger DISGUSTED by Egg Fried Rice Video (BBC Food)”.  The controversy that followed in wake of the video has been called “Rice-gate”, and the poor BBC cooking show host has been mercilessly trolled on social media (Kidd, 2020). 

At the climax of Uncle Roger’s playfully hostile commentary on the poor unsuspecting BBC cooking host Hersha Patel, he is flabbergasted at how the host cooks rice:  

“Drain … What she doin? What she doin? Drain the rice …? oh my God oh my God . You killing me, woman … Haiyaaa … She draining rice with colander … Who cook like this? … ooooh …. Uncle Roger sad now.”

Ng, 2020

Rice is not just rice for the Chinese 

The video has already drawn more than 49K comments, and a quick look through the first 50 to 100 shows that Uncle Roger has unwittingly sounded a battle cry for Asians to rise up and defend, promote and extoll their culture … or at least the way they cook and prepare rice. But rice is not simply a staple of Asians’ diet, like potatoes are for Europeans and Anglo Saxons. Rice transcends diet and enters the realm of the cultural and Asian identity. The literal translation of the casual Chinese greeting, “chi fan le mei?” is, “have you eaten rice yet?”.

By the end of this vlog’s savage play-by-play commentary on a cooking show’s making of egg fried rice, Uncle Roger is exasperated and clearly disapproves of the BBC show’s cultural appropriation of the classic Chinese dish. He even goes as far as admonishing the BBC: 

“BBC, this not good video. People use this video to make egg fired rice – they think egg fired rice disgusting. Not good for Chinese culture.” 

Ng, 2020

How is this video to be understood? Is it part of cancel culture taken to a logically comedic extreme? Is it part of the movement against cultural appropriation? Is it just a funny video about a guy venting? 

The answer to all of these questions is, yes.

Cultural appropriation, or misappropriation, is the adoption of an element or elements of one culture by members of another culture, especially a dominant culture that appropriates from disadvantaged minority cultures. Many African Americans, for example, have expressed their disapproval of Caucasians adopting dreadlock hairstyles, or Chinese netizens in 2018 criticizing an American Caucasian for wearing a traditional Chinese dress to her prom (Schmidt, 2018). 

There is little doubt that as an immigrant to — and minority in — the US and UK, the creator of the Uncle Roger persona and video, Malaysian Chinese stand-up comedian Nigel Ng, has experienced prejudice and racism, and is therefore surely sympathetic to various calls in cancel culture and cultural mis-appropriation. Two relevant culinary flashpoints come to mind from last year alone. The first was the promotion material for the Caucasian cooking celebrity Gordon Ramsay, who promoted his new restaurant as an “authentic Asian eating house”; the second was the Chinese-inspired restaurant Lucky Lee’s in New York, whose white owner said it would serve “clean” food that wouldn’t make people feel “bloated and icky”, implying that regular Chinese restaurants serve unhealthy food. It is difficult to cancel a celebrity, but less so for the non-famous: not-so-lucky Lucky Lee’s was effectively “cancelled” out of business after only 8 months (Yeung, 2020). 

However, Uncle Roger is a comedy persona, and if he is to be seen as funny by a wide audience, then he must distance himself from the real, serious discourse of “cancel culture” and colonial cultural appropriation. Many Chinese will see in Uncle Roger a familiar uncle-stereotype (“uncle” is a polite form referring to any old man) who likes to complain; he is not a serious and angry cultural activist. 

But while Uncle Roger’s mannerisms, attitude and tone of speech strike a close portrayal to the good natured but nagging old Chinese uncle, the 29-year-old Nigel Ng’s 51-year-old character is already visually unbelievable; and then there is Uncle Roger’s staccato, broken English, which nonetheless doesn’t miss a beat and contains a rich vocabulary belying the heavy Catonese accent and lack of articles, inflections and the “be” verb. When I first watched the video, I couldn’t but wonder if that was the comedian’s real accent or put on. Nigel Ng has invited us into the fantasy realm of this complaining and nagging Uncle Roger. And even though most humor contains kernels of truth for the comedian, Jerry Seinfeld perhaps put it best when he said, “Jokes are not real” (Montana, 2018). Comedians find a funny subject and go for the laugh.

The punchline of two worlds colliding

We imagine the target audience of the character Uncle Roger is Chinese friends, family and diaspora in the vlogosphere, just as we imagine the BBC host’s audience are typically Caucasian and using the tools, ingredients and methods typically available to that British audience. The humor grows from the collision of these two cultures over Chinese cuisine. However, there is a double absurdity here – one on either side of the cultural divide. From the Euro-American view, this is an attack on “our” usual way of cooking rice; what other way is there? Why the melodrama? And from Uncle Roger’s Chinese view, there is another way of making rice – and it is so central to Chinese culture, “our” way is the only authentic way, there can be no other. 

And this, of course, is the joke punchline: when a secondary meaning (Chinese way of cooking rice) is unexpectedly revealed to oppose the primary one (the BBC host’s way). Or, is it vice-versa? It is actually both, which is why this video has such cross-cultural appeal – the punchline shifts one way for the “Western” viewer and the other for the Chinese viewer. It’s a bifurcated comedic space simultaneously inviting two different cultural directions. The clever comedy is their inevitable collision.

References

Kidd, J. (2020, July). Malaysian comedian behind viral Uncle Roger video on YouTube ‘super grateful’ people love his work.   https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3098603/malaysian-comedian-behind-viral-uncle-roger-video-youtube

Montana, S. (2018, Aug. 15).  Jerry Seinfeld Says Jokes Are Not Real Life. Interview by Dan Amira. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/magazine/jerry-seinfeld-says-jokes-are-not-real-life.html?auth=login-facebook

Ng, N. (2019). Uncle Roger DISGUSTED by this Egg Fried Rice Video (BBC Food). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53me-ICi_f8&t=6s

Schmidt, S. (2018, May 1). ‘It’s just a dress’: Teen’s Chinese prom attire stirs cultural appropriation debate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/05/01/its-just-a-dress-teens-chinese-prom-attire-stirs-cultural-appropriation-debate/

Yeung, J. (2020, July 30). The Uncle Roger controversy: Why people are outraged by a video about cooking rice.  https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/uncle-roger-rice-food-appropriation-intl-hnk/index.html 
#UncleRoger #NigelNg #rice #CulturalAppropriation