Late last year, Billy Corgan told a story about how Bill Burr might be his half-brother during a visit to the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast after the crew accidentally put up a photo of the comedian behind the Smashing Pumpkins frontman.

“Most of my friends don’t even know this story,” Corgan recalled at the time. “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.”

“I thought the first thing she was going to say was, ‘Oh, I thought you’d notice the resemblance. 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,’" he went on. "This is a true story. I’m not making this up; there is no joke in this.”

Last month, the comedian visited Mandel's podcast and the host thought it would be fun "bringing family together." Corgan came out as a surprise guest, marking the first time the potential siblings ever met.

The interaction was awkward, and Burr called Mandel an "a**hole" for plotting the meeting, but for Corgan the experience was "surreal."

“It was pretty surreal. First of all, I’d never met Bill Burr. Secondly, he really does look like my father, like in person,” he admitted in a recent interview with GQ. “I’d seen the pictures. Never seen him in person. So it’s the surreal thing of shaking somebody’s hands who you have this kind of physical affinity for. And there’s all these questions, and then you’re thrown into a situation where there’s a camera rolling. So what was captured was truly this awkward exchange of, ‘OK, what do we do with this information?’ Bill’s mind is lightning-quick, and he’s viciously funny… So it was a very interesting dynamic.”

“He was very nice about the whole thing. And he basically left the door open to meet again and let it be known that I was always welcome in his world," Corgan added. "But you could even feel, as was happening, that there was this, this meta thing going on. We realized that both of us had stumbled into something bigger than us.”

Burr's reaction to the whole thing was a little colder than Corgan's. Shortly after the meeting, he aired his frustration in an interview. “I did not appreciate what Howie did. Not at all,” he said. “Howie did what he did because he is a Hollywood whore and he doesn’t care what happens. He could’ve said something and he just brings up all that weirdness."

It is still unclear if Corgan and Burr truly are related.

Susie Wargin