Bill Burr won’t be buying tickets to see Howie Mandel perform live anytime soon.
This week during an appearance on The Rich Eisen Show, the 56-year-old comedian ripped into Mandel for ambushing him with the news that he may be related to Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan.
When Burr was a guest on Mandel’s Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast earlier this month, Corgan, who has previously theorized that the two may be related, was a surprise special guest.
Last year, Corgan told Mandel that his stepmother said she thought Burr might be his half-brother adding to the fact that his “father did once tell me that I had a half-brother named Bill, who was born around the same time as me.”
“So, 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.”
His stepmom continued by explaining who Burr was and then pulled up a photo of him on her cellphone.
“I kind of noticed right away, ‘Gee, he kind of looks like my father,’” the singer recalled. “Bill Burr looks more like my father than Bill Burr looks like me or I look like Bill Burr.”
Corgan’s stepmother then shared her suspicion that Burr might have been one of his dad’s “illegitimate children.”
“‘Bill Burr might be one of the children that your father sired in his days of being a traveling musician,’” Corgan remembered her saying to him. “This is a true story. I’m not making this up, there is no joke in this. This is a true story. I’ve never told this anywhere, honestly.”
When the two met on Mandel’s podcast, Burr jokingly called the America’s Got Talent judge a “d—” and admonished Corgan for airing the news they might be related in an interview.
“Did you ever think the fact that I never told that story, that maybe you shouldn’t?” Burr asked, calling Mandel “rude” and accusing him of setting up the encounter to boost his “ratings.”
“That’s the thing, he’s bringing (us) in here not because he’s trying to heal the bulls— that we went through growing up. He’s getting (us) here just for the f—ing ratings,” Burr said.
“What was supposed to happen? Are we going to go play catch?” Burr continued. “We’re both in our 50s.”
Some listeners thought it was all in good fun. But on Eisen’s show, Burr said he was unhappy the Canada’s Got Talent judge tried to shock him with the bombshell revelation and Corgan’s arrival in studio.
“Howie did what he did because he is a Hollywood whore, and he doesn’t care what happens,” Burr said. “He could have said something, and he just brings up all that weirdness. … Billy’s fine. That’s the first time I ever met him, and it was fine, but I did not appreciate what Howie did. No, not at all.”
Burr said he didn’t “hate” the former Deal Or No Deal host for the awkward set up. “How do you like hate a germaphobe? He’s not threatening. He just walks with his arms in so he doesn’t rub against curtains that he owns. That’s the weirdest thing about him. He’s a strange man.”
But Mandel continued to stoke the controversial reveal by sharing a now-expired photo (captured by the New York Post) to his Instagram Stories that showed Burr’s and Corgan’s faces photoshopped onto the poster for the 2008 Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly comedy Step Brothers.
Burr and Corgan aren’t the only celebrities who might be related. Back in 2023, during a chat with Kelly Ripa on her Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, Matthew McConaughey suggested he and Woody Harrelson might be half-brothers.
“My kids call him Uncle Woody. His kids call me Uncle Matthew,” he said. “My family thinks a lot of pictures of him are me. His family thinks a lot of pictures of me are him.”
He said his mother dropped a hint they were related during a family vacation. “In Greece a few years ago, we’re sitting around talking about how close we are and our families,” McConaughey told Ripa. “And my mom is there, and she says, ‘Woody, I knew your dad’ … Everyone was aware of the ellipses that my mom left after ‘knew.’ It was a loaded K-N-E-W.”
Harrelson then told Esquire that it was “very much true” that the two were blood relations.
“Well, it’s very much true. I learned from Ma Mac, Matthew’s mother, that she did have a relationship with my father for a relatively short period of time that coincided with the time that his father and mother were on a sabbatical, and with the time of Matthew’s, let’s say, origination,” he said.
“We haven’t done a test, but there are too many times that I think to myself, My God, the similarities! The things he does, the things he says–just the way he is. I’ve felt that for years.”