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Billy Corgan had quite the interesting story to tell during a recent visit to the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast. The conversation was sparked when Mandel realized his crew put up a photo of comedian Bill Burr behind the Smashing Pumpkins frontman. Corgan then recalled seeing look alike memes circulating the internet before revealing that he and Burr might actually be related.
“Most of my friends don’t even know this story,” he prefaced the anecdote. “About 10 years ago, one of my brothers was having a birthday party, and my stepmother was there, who was obviously married to my father. And my stepmother said to me, ‘Do you know who Bill Burr is?’ Now at that point, I had never heard of Bill Burr; I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know he was a comedian or anything. He could have been the guy down the street.”
Corgan continued: “And she said, ‘Well, he’s this comedian.’ I think I even somehow called up a picture on the phone, and I kind of noticed right away, ‘Gee, he kind of looks like my father.’ Bill Burr looks more like my father than Bill Burr looks like me or I look like Bill Burr. So I said to my mother, ‘Why are you asking me this?'”
“I thought the first thing she was going to say was, ‘Oh, I thought you’d notice the resemblance,'” he added. “She goes, ‘I think it might be one of your father’s illegitimate children. Bill Burr might be one of the children that your father sired in his days being a traveling musician.’ This is a true story. I’m not making this up; there is no joke in this.”
Corgan then said that even his father said it could be a possibility. “[He] did once tell me that I had a half-brother named Bill who was basically born around the same time as me,” he revealed (Corgan is 57 and Burr is 56).
Apparently his dad fathered 12 children out of wedlock. But Corgan ended the story by clarifying that he doesn't actually think he and the comedian are half-brothers, but it's “just one of those things."
“There are people in the world who just look alike,” he concluded.
Listen to the full podcast episode below.
