Billy Corgan and the comedian Bill Burr – well... are they related? Seriously.
It has been noted by many that they do indeed look alike. Now Corgan has claimed that Burr may actually be his half brother.
The theory came up when Corgan guested on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast after Mandel had mischievously used an image of Burr instead of Corgan on the studio’s screen.
This prompted an anecdote from the Smashing Pumpkins man. “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,” he continued. “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.
“And she said, ‘Well, he’s this comedian.’ And 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?'”
He went on to say: “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 travelling musician.’ This is a true story, I’m not making this up. There is no joke in this.”
He’s wrong - what makes the story funny is that Burr himself is clearly no fan of the Smashing Pumpkins. A few years back a video appeared on YouTube in which he rips into '90s grunge bands (albeit with a tongue in his cheek).
After running though Nirvana and Pearl Jam, he turned his attention to his doppelganger’s out: “...and when Smashing Pumpkins came out, whatever the fuck he was singing about... cats, siamese twins. What was that song? [Does a spot-on Billy singing Bullet With Butterfly Wings] I was trying so hard but by then I was 25 years old and I tell you, it’s over: music is for young people.”
So, was Bill Burr unwittingly cracking wise about his half brother when that video was published in 2017? What does Burr think of this new revelation? This one could run and run.
