Asian culture here is just not as visible
in the UK, unfortunately.
I think, if I started making videos
where Uncle Roger's saying things like,
"Oh, I'm Asian, I love eating dog."
Then that would be a problem, right?
But to the people who accuse me
of that character being a racist caricature,
I would urge them to actually listen
to the things I'm saying
and see that everything I say
is lifting our people up.
It's always hard to explain
when people ask what it's like growing up in Malaysia.
I think it's a very normal childhood.
I got friends, I got school and we did karaoke a lot.
It's like growing up in the UK
we just have different habits
and different things we do.
I realised when I first wanted to do comedy
when I was in university in the US,
Northwestern university, just near Chicago.
A few months afterwards
I started doing stand-up just by myself.
And yeah, I got hooked since.
And I realised, "Oh this is what I wanna do."
I would go to work and then do my data science job.
And at night, I would go do an open mic
or go do a gig somewhere, travel to a gig.
Come back, sleep, go to work again the next day.
So I was working a full-time job
and still performing four or five nights a week.
It got to the point
where I was performing so much
that I started taking more and more days off from work
and people aren't happy about that.
So I realised at a certain point,
something has to give.
I think for me, it was a very calculated risk.
It was more like I didn't just quit the job
and then went into comedy.
I was like, "Okay, I make this amount.
I make a decent income through comedy.
Maybe I can make this work."
So, it wasn't zero to a hundred straight away.
It was more like step by step,
let's scale down the data science
and scale up the comedy.
And I realised, I wanna do this comedy thing
and really give this a shot.
So that's when I quit.
I went full-time comedy in September 2019.
[CAT] What did your parents make of it?
My parents, I think, you know how Asian parents are.
Usually they want their kids to have a stable job
because they didn't come from much.
So they just want their kids to have a stable job,
stable income, stable life, that kind of thing.
So my parents were very worried at first
and they were like,
"You have a good job as a data scientist.
Why are you giving this up?"
They were worried but I kept telling them,
"I'm fine, I'm doing okay.
I'll try to make this work."
They also didn't really understand what stand-up was
because they were growing up in Malaysia their whole lives
and stand-up is a pretty Western art form, right?
So at first they were like, "Why are you doing this?
You're not that funny."
They would come to my shows.
My dad told me.
My mum and dad, they speak English,
but they don't really get jokes
because you need a certain high level of command
of the English language
to get things like sarcasm and metaphors
and how jokes work, right?
I performed in Malaysia one time
and they came to see me perform.
They said they didn't really understand what I said
because when I'm performing, I speak like this.
It's a very neutral, neutralish English accent.
And I speak quite fast as well for Asian standards.
So my dad told me, "I didn't understand what you were saying
but I just laughed when other people laughed."
I moved here mainly for comedy
and so I can drink tap water and not die.
It's f**king awesome here, right, tap water!
I was Skyping my parents, who are back in Malaysia.
I'm like, "Hey, don't try this at home."
[CAT] Just explain to me the context of
when you came up with the character of Uncle Roger.
Doing character comedy was a goal of mine.
I started researching how older Asian men act
and what they wear.
I sent a text to all my friends asking them,
"Send me a picture of your dad."
And a bright-coloured polo was by far
the most popular choice of outfit for them.
Uncle Roger is a reflection
of the middle-aged Asian men,
middle-aged Asian uncle.
We call them uncles back there, that I grew up with.
They're a bit sassy.
They're a bit know-it-all,
but ultimately they're kind people.
And they're very, just stuck in their ways.
So the first few things I made
were short little Instagram clips,
Instagram, TikTok clips, 40 seconds.
I remember the first one
was how regular people answer the phone
versus how Asian parents answer the phone.
Hey, Evelyn. Hey, I'm actually out right now.
Can I call you back when I get home?
All right, cool, thanks.
Hello!
Hi, how are you?
When I first uploaded that to TikTok, Instagram
people liked it.
So I kept making more of those short little things.
Oh, here's how Uncle Roger makes rice.
And I use a rice cooker and yeah, it hit hard.
I think it got like a million views overnight.
And to me at the time was really, really big.
And I thought to myself,
"Okay, I think people like this character.
Let's see if I can make something in...
Let's see if I can use this and make something longer form."
And that's when the first
Uncle Roger YouTube video came about,
which was the BBC Food egg fried rice one.
Drain it.
Drain, what's she doing?
What's she doing?
Drained the, oh my God.
You're killing me, woman.
Hiya drain the ri-
The rice.
She draining rice with colander.
It struck a chord with me
because it was just the way she made rice was so bizarre.
Egg fried rice in Asian culture,
it is a very simple dish to make.
It's all like whatever's left your fridge,
you just use it.
Like the leftover rice, leftover vegetables,
leftover meat, whatever.
Just whack it in there.
This is just so bizarre and so funny.
Yeah, I just made a reaction video.
I was like, "Oh, s**t, people like this.
So, let's make more.
And let's see where this character can go."
[CAT] You’ve spoken on your podcast before
about people accusing you of perpetuating negative stereotypes.
Yeah, I do get feedback sometimes
that Uncle Roger perpetuates negative stereotypes
for Asian people.
And I see where they're coming from.
I'm doing a character that it's very close to me
and it went so big because everybody can relate to it.
People who grew up in Asia
they know an Uncle Roger in their family.
I view Uncle Roger as a celebration of Asianness
and Asian culture and Asian things in general.
Because Uncle Roger, if you look at the things I make,
Uncle Roger never puts his own race down, right?
He's very positive,
sometimes almost too positive for comedy.
When I make the character
he's always very positive about his own race.
He's very proud of it.
And also, in Western media, Asian culture,
when I say Asian here, I mean more east-Asian culture,
Chinese, Hong Kong that region, Taiwanese.
Asian culture here is just not as visible
in the UK, unfortunately.
I think, if you look at TV programmes here
I can't even think of one big Asian presenter
or just one big Asian guy you can look up to.
I think if I started making videos
where Uncle Roger is saying things like,
"Oh, I'm Asian, I love eating dog."
Then that would be a problem, right?
But to the people who accuse me
of that character being a racist caricature,
I would urge them to actually listen
to the things I'm saying
and see that everything I say
is lifting our people up.
I think the people who also think
Uncle Roger shouldn't have an accent,
they're essentially saying that Uncle Roger
should sound white,
which is very problematic in itself.
Asians have accents.
And sometimes we wanna do a character with an accent.
Uncle Roger without an accent,
it just wouldn't be right.
[CAT] You’ve now got over three million subscribers on YouTube
and that’s pretty much just happened in the last year.
Yeah, I know people who have made videos for years
and not at my level of subscribers
and I don't take any of that for granted.
I always wanna challenge myself.
I keep making videos that are better.
The growth was insane.
When the first Uncle Roger video came out
with a BBC Food, egg fried rice one,
it got written up in all the newspapers
in every single Asian country.
I was doing radio interviews.
I was doing Zoom interviews with the Philippines,
Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore,
Korea, Thailand, everywhere.
I appeared in Variety.
Yeah, my social medias just exploded overnight.
I started needing to build a team around me
because I was just really stressed
under all the workload
and fending off all the interview requests
and just everything.
Everything changed, it just blew up.
And Uncle Roger went and viral on all the platforms,
Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube.
And then you guys picked it up,
LADbible picked it up,
UNILAD or 9GAG, everywhere.
[CAT] So what does the future hold?
The future for me,
I wanna keep making videos
because I still really enjoy making them.
I enjoy the editing process,
even though during every edit,
there's a point where I'm like,
"Oh this video is gonna be so s**t, ugh, so bad."
But then after when the edit's done, you realise,
"Oh, it actually turned out pretty good."
I'm also hoping to do more ambitious things,
hopefully get some sort of scripted production in the works.
Or have bigger-scale projects,
maybe a sitcom, maybe a non-scripted travel show.
That kind of thing.
Who knows if that will happen or not.
But regardless, there are things
that are completely under my control
and that's just, keep making videos that I enjoy.
[CAT] If you could say anything to Uncle Roger,
what would you say?
I would say, "Hey, keep doing what you're doing
and don't let the haters get to you, Uncle."
Now, can you stop annoying me, hiya!