5 Celebrities With Secretly Talented Siblings

5 Steve Jobs' Sister Is an Award-Winning Author

The Celebrity:

Steve Jobs single-handedly invented the arrogant computer douche who wrecks any normal conversation about technology by turning it into a Mac vs. PC debate, defining himself by what brand of machine he uses to watch scat porn. And also Apple. He was also the subject of the greatest Epic Rap Battles of History ever produced:

The Talented Sibling:

Mona Simpson is Steve's sister, and she has a pretty impressive list of awards under her belt, including a Guggenheim Award, a Whiting Book Award, and a literature prize from the American Academy for Arts and Letters.

On top of that, she's an English professor at UCLA, fighting the good fight against criminally stupid Internet word mangling. On top of even that, she's also a professor of literature and language at Bard College. Holy shit. When does she even have time to sit back and admire her boobs? I ... assume that's what women do in their spare time? I don't talk to many women; that's just what I'd do if I were one.

In 1986, Simpson wrote an award-winning book titled Anywhere But Here, which was eventually turned into a movie starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon. Here's the crazy part: She didn't even know her brother was Steve Jobs until she was 25 years old. By that point, she had worked her way up from abject poverty to middle class on her own, busting her ass to make it in the writing world, which I can tell you from personal experience is a feat in and of itself.

I would suggest waiting until you're done with this article before you do it, but if you click that last link, you'll see why she's special. It's an emotional piece -- a eulogy for her brother, in fact. I just don't want you all teary eyed while I'm trying to make juvenile jokes about turds or balls. I have my own living to make, and as wonderful a woman as she is, I don't want Mona Simpson ruining my middle school humor.

4 James Cameron's Brother Is a Genius Engineer

The Celebrity:

You know who James Cameron is. Terminator, Aliens, Titanic, explosions and asses. He's also apparently a huge, childish dick who loses his temper at the drop of a hat and has been known to confiscate cellphones when they ring on his set, grab a nail gun, and tack those fuckers to the wall.

Actually, now that I think about it, I kind of want to see that.

The Talented Sibling:

Mike Cameron is James' younger brother, and he happens to be crazy smart. How smart? Well, for one, he's an aerospace engineer. That alone is enough to net him a spot on this list, but it goes much further than that. And if I wrote for a newspaper, they would fire me in a frenzied rage for not using the word "deeper" instead of "further," because newspapers are stupid.

The crazy, mind-blowing accomplishment by Mike sounds unimpressive at first. He invented a way to film professionally while extremely deep underwater -- 12,600 feet, to be precise. Big deal, right? We've seen plenty of documentaries that explore the ocean floor. National Geographic explores deep water all the time like it ain't shit. They've definitely got him beat in that department ... except for the part where Mike's technology is so far advanced from anything we've ever seen, Jet Propulsion Laboratory wants to use it to explore Europa, a moon of Jupiter thought to have the best chance of supporting oceanic extraterrestrial life.

So what did he do that's so amazing? First, he eliminated the need for thousands of pounds' worth of power cables that fuck up most deep water expeditions, replacing it with a single fiber optic strand smaller than a human hair. Then, he designed a camera robot that is able to squeeze through openings smaller than 2 feet. According to that Wired article above, normal deep sea rovers are six times that size. Then Mike modified the lighting system so it's not filming a bunch of stirred-up sediment and floating fish turds, tweaked the communications problems that plague extreme ocean exploration, and boom: We now have a robotic film crew that is capable of exploring the 30-mile-deep saline oceans of Europa.

I think it's time to live in a world where we refer to James as "Mike Cameron's brother."

3 Leslie Nielsen's Brother Was a Highly Successful Politician

The Celebrity:

If I have to explain who Leslie Nielsen is, you need to stop what you're doing right now and go watch the Airplane and Naked Gun movies, and the Police Squad! TV show. Call in a sick day to work or school, explaining that you just discovered his body of work. They'll understand. In fact, the only punishment you might receive would be a dock in pay or grades for not having done it sooner. Here's a short compilation of clips from various movies to get you started:

The Talented Sibling:

Erik Nielsen was Leslie's older brother, and he served in the Canadian Parliament for 30 straight years, uninterrupted. He was a staunch, hardass conservative who was often called "Velcro lips" because of his habit of holding back information from his colleagues and the public. Which in itself is pretty damn funny, since his brother was a certifiable comedy genius who didn't seem to hold anything back at all (including busting ass on morning talk shows).

But Erik wasn't just a face in the political crowd. During that big, mean fucker's time, he served as opposition house leader, leader of the opposition (which is evidently ... different?), deputy prime minister, president of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, and minister of national defense. In reading down the list of positions he's held, I'm starting to think that he looked around the room on his first day in office and said, "I can't make up my mind which one I like the most. I think I'll just try them all. Leslie, come over here and fart in this dickhead's face."

Eventually, his hardass nature and his refusal to answer questions about important things like politicians fucking the government and its people got his ass flat-out fired. Of course, a dude like that doesn't just fade away into retirement. He took his lumps like a man and settled down with a modest job as chairman of the National Transportation Agency and eventually president of Solar Engineering, Hawaii Inc. and Solar Electric Engineering Distributors of Canada.

2 Daniel O'Brien's Brother Is a Goddamn Musical Prodigy

The Celebrity:

Yep, I'm calling Cracked's own Daniel O'Brien a celebrity. When you bring in viewers by the tens of millions on one of the highest traffic comedy websites in the world, you are a celebrity. Deal with it, Dan. For the rest of you, you know him from ... well, here. Agents of Cracked, his column, After Hours. You can find his big ol' head flopping around all over the Internet, saying comedy words at people and then rubbing his phat check in the faces of his disgusted bank tellers. Without Dan's writing, acting, and editorial input, I dare say this would not be the same website. It would probably just be a bunch of drunk guys farting into a webcam and then laughing until they vomited Jagerbombs.

The Talented Sibling:

Thomas O'Brien is Dan's older brother, and let me get this out of the way right off the bat: If he wasn't worth talking about, I wouldn't talk about him. Neither Dan nor I owe each other any favors, and even if I did, I wouldn't pay it back like this. It would be paid in whores and rides to the free clinic. Tom is truly, genuinely a musical genius. Here, see for yourself -- I'll ease you into it:

That is from a series he calls "One Take Thursday." The "one take" part of that is exactly how it sounds. He sits down at his keyboard and busts out a piece in one take ... from fucking memory. No practicing, no sheet music. Just him and a keyboard or a piano, having fun. Now, let me ramp it up a notch by showing you this:

That's Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek," and even if you've never heard the original song, it is still amazing. He gives his music the same amount of emotion and enthusiasm that his parents did with their shame and resentment of Dan. It's a goddamn crime that he isn't doing this for a living right now. He's taught high school music, but through his own admission, there just isn't a lot of money in being able to play the piano. Not until you get up into the "playing concert halls" or "writing movie themes" rung of the ladder -- which he's already started by creating the opening theme to the aforementioned Agents of Cracked.

Surely there's someone out there in the industry who's reading this that can hook this man up. The thought of him going his whole life without utilizing that talent on a grander stage than YouTube makes me so angry, I could just grab Dan by the ear and elbow his temple over and over and over and over again. Just elbowing him so hard that he starts crying and trying to get away, but I'm all like, "You ain't goin' nowhere, funny man! You get back here and take your medicine! Your elbow medicine!"

Oh, and if you still need convincing, watch how ridiculously fast his fingers are in this piece:

1 Art Garfunkel's Brother Shapes the Entire Computer Industry

The Celebrity:

Art Garfunkel is the "white guy 'fro"-sporting half of the legendary folk duo Simon and Garfunkel. They entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, causing Art's giant 'fro to fluff with excitement. On top of its historic musical career, his enormous, monstrous 'fro is also an accomplished actor and poet.

The Talented Sibling:

Remember that whole Y2K crisis that had everyone panicking in the year two thous- ohhhhh, that's what that means. Sorry, sometimes I'm a little slow picking up on acronyms. Anyway, when all that dumb bullshit went down, Jerome Garfunkel was one of the big dogs they went to for a solution. Why? Because it was mainly a problem in the COBOL programming language (heavily used in older business and financial software), and he happened to be a lifelong developer of it.

In fact, the guy knows the ins and outs of just about every nerdy language you can think of, and has been a major player in the software engineering community since software became a thing. Without him, the porn box that you're reading with your face-eyes right now would look and operate very differently. Because even when he's not doing hands-on work, he teaches scores of other programmers and software engineers what they need to know in order to make dicks and titties flop around on the screen without making your processor catch on fire.

On top of that, his own gigantic, heaving 'fro was the senior technical adviser to the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of the Interior. So when something technical fucks up on a grand scale, he's like the planet's IT guy. Except instead of just telling you to stop going to horse-fuck sites, he can rewrite your OS to prevent you from ever going there in the first place.

Also, he had a gargantuan 'fro.

Special thanks to Sammy Trujillo, Paige Turner, Kelly Stone, and Paul K Pickett for vital help with research! You can find all the stuff you'd ever care to know about John Cheese right here.