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I’ve seen some look-a-likes in my day, but this one really threw me for a loop.
You may be familiar with a little phenomenon known as Chappelle’s Show. There’s a skit about a televised dice game in a project. It’s pretty funny, but what isn’t on that show? Anyway, the announcer looked slightly familiar. Then during the commercial break, they showed one of those Burger King commercials with the deadpan, hipster office people religiously eating Burger King for lunch, always with zany results. I could have sworn the boss from the commercial was the same guy from the skit I just saw. Vaguely Irish, a toothy, shit-eating grin, same voice.
Later on I saw a Comedy Central Presents Bill Burr special, which was
the same guy again. So I finally knew his name.
“This guy’s blowing up,” I said to myself.
Then E! brought back Talk Soup as The Soup with Joel McHale and I saw him again! I mean, anyone who follows in the footsteps of Greg Kinnear and Hal Sparks is A-OK in my book.
But on closer inspection, despite sharing the same face and profession, they do not in fact share the same name. Bill Burr is not spelled the same as Joel McHale. He must be living a double life for what ever reason.
I know what you mean - I had seen a hilarious stand-up routine on Comedy Central by a comedian who described a scary conflict he overheard on the subway between a yelping young woman and her abusive boyfriend - “Ow! - my neck” the comic intoned in a sidesplitting high-pitched rendition of the woman’s voice, before noting that his own fear of interfering in the dispute was in large measure inspired by his own fear of becoming as a result the second passenger overheard issuing the same cry…so when I saw Joel McHale on E’s *The Soup*, I thought, “that’s him!”, then became puzzled when McHale’s bios at IMDb and the E network failed to note any background in standup…it took my discovery of your post in the category of what a friend and I describe as “great minds think alike - and so do we” to clear up my own separated-at-birth misattribution of the source of my subway-layed laughter, which turns out to have been lookalike Bill Burr. For which, my amused thanks and good wishes.
P.S. I even phoned Burr’s agent in New York, in hopes of having him identify the routine in question as that indeed of his client, but, harried and diverted from his booking chores, he suggested I return to the fan sites, which I did, finding therein from delighted fan posts the clinching and triumphant I.D. I had sought all along. Comic relief indeed…