Nigel Ng is a British-Malaysian stand-up comic who has recently become incredibly popular playing the character Uncle Roger, a surly older Chinese man based on his father and his friends’ fathers and uncles. The character got his start reacting to a video of a BBC cook making egg fried rice which he viciously took down for being incorrect.
That video made me laugh so hard I think I might have ruptured something, and it eventually piled up 18 million views. Ng put a lot of work into the character and infuses his weekly Uncle Roger videos with a lot of dry wit as he watches videos or gets a job at a restaurant and berates the customers, and it’s translated to over 2.5 million subscribers for Ng.
Ng’s latest Uncle Roger video, where he works in a bubble tea shop in Sweden, also helped me understand why Charli D’Amelio has 100 million followers on TikTok and her videos have upwards of 40 million views minimum when Uncle Roger said “TikTok all videos of underage girls dancing. I’m not a pedo.” I finally get why people are watching her channel and I don’t want to be anywhere near those people.
It is apparently a powerful force because just last week D’Amelio was canceled for not sounding grateful that she had so many subscribers and saying she was hoping to get to 100 million soon. More than a million people unsubscribed from her channel and literally four days later she’s at 100 million.
The Verge reports that D’Amelio is expanding beyond TikTok with “a podcast, further expansion into YouTube, the announcement of a book deal, and more.”
I can’t think of anything I want to do less than read a book written by Charli D’Amelio. Luckily, no one will ever have to because the actual book will be written by a ghostwriter, which is some poor schmuck like me who will have to listen to her ideas, pretend they’re good, somehow turn them into a book and then let her take all the credit.
What I’m saying is stop paying attention to Charli D’Amelio and go watch something actually entertaining on YouTube like Nigel Ng or Good Mythical Morning or if you must watch someone sexy dance on TikTok find someone who’s old enough to have boobs. Just 2-3 years older, more “Girls of the PAC-10” and less “Girls who look 10.”