Taskmaster’s Joanne McNally meets doppelganger siblings for first time

Joanne McNally has met her half-brothers for the first time after she was adopted in the 1980s.

The My Therapist Ghosted Me star, 41, took to social media with pictures of her alongside four half-brothers – Conor, Paddy, Finbar and Ronan – who she linked up with in Edinburgh after tracking down her biological father Kevin a few years ago.

‘When you’ve never looked like anyone before meeting my half brothers was wild!’ she said in a heartfelt social media post.

Joanne – who presents the hit podcast alongside Vogue Williams and is one of the hottest stand-up comics working right now – explained how she was adopted from Roscommon after her birth father ‘very understandably legged it to Oz’.

The comedian joked that she’d been ‘upcycled’ to Dublin, where she was brought up by her mother and father Frank, the latter of whom died when she was a teenager.

‘Kevin bio dad had a rake of Ozzie sons and we hung out in Edinburgh and personally I think I’m the image of Conor and Paddy, mad to see myself as a man!’ Joanne said alongside a carousel of pictures from the evening, adding: ‘The last photo is me being mesmerised by my own reflection in a 26 yr old man.’

The first photo sees the comedian laughing with her arms around two of her half brothers, who grinned alongside her with chequered shirts on. The second snap saw the four of them lined up in a row smiling, with the last picture showing her alongside her mirror image in male form.

The brothers do look a lot like their half-sister Joanne – who appeared on the latest Taskmaster series alongside  Nick Mohammed and others – as friends and fans took to the comments section of the post acknowledging the likeness.

laurac_ardiff wrote, ‘What a lovely thing to read. And they have your cute nose!!!!’ to which the Taskmaster star replied: ‘And dimples and the same eyes!’

julzi_boo said, ‘This is so so amazing 💗💗 there is so much resemblance- same eyes and smile!’ as scouse_magram agreed: ‘Matching noses, eyes and dimples.’

TV presenter Ruth Langsford commented: ‘How wonderful! And they share your love of Pringles too!’

Joanne has previously opened up about being adopted, and told The Irish Independent of her biological dad in 2019: ‘I’d done my growing up, and my parents were great. I didn’t really need anything from him.’

The publication reports that Joanne was preoccupied with the idea of not looking like anyone in her adoptive family, which drove her to seek her biological parents out.

While Joanne has met her birth mother, they aren’t in touch. But on meeting Kevin, the pair hit it off and she was happy to find out they shared a resemblance.

The star was in the Scottish capital for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where she was performing a limited run of work in progress performances after the huge success of her Prosecco Express show – which broke the venue’s record for the most wine bought in one sitting.

Having only started stand-up five years ago Joanne has already cemented herself as one of the best comics on the circuit.

‘I ended up going into stand up because I was very unwell with eating disorders, so I had to leave my job,’ she explained to last year.

‘It was a time of huge change in my life,’ Joanne said. ‘I knew I couldn’t go back to my old life. I needed a reason to get better, and going back to my old world was no reason. That wasn’t going to drive me forward to recover. I needed a complete pivot.

‘I didn’t think the pivot would be this severe but it just started kind of happening. It was all a very happy accident.’