Rachel Dratch joined English comedian John Oliver on a segment of his late-night talk and news satire show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and they founded a church!!!
Dratch appeared as Oliver's wife, Wanda Jo Oliver and together, they talked to the viewers about their church, Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption Church. In the hilarious video, the fictional couple ask viewers for donations to support them. They also pretend to treat the viewers through television. Dratch and Oliver joke about being able to treat Lupus on someone who doesn't even know that they have Lupus.
They ask the viewers to sow the seed, which Dratch's character Wanda-Jo clarifies means money. "Don't send us the actual seeds", she says.
“Praise be to the IRS,” Dratch adds, referring to the surprisingly limited criteria to start a church, “the most permissive of government agencies. Hallelujah!”
And while Wanda-Jo is fictional, the church is actually very real. They even have a website. Oliver posted a link to the website on his Twitter page the day after the video went public. Their mission as stated on the website reads, " When John Oliver found out that Robert Tilton, Kenneth Copeland and other pastors of their ilk have been taking advantage of the open-ended IRS definition of the word "church" and procuring a litany of tax breaks, he founded the Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption Church, a tax-exempt organization that you certainly can't say is not a church. From that day forward, he has been collecting copious donations and all manner of divine blessings, but mainly the donations. "
Oliver also apparently corresponded back and forth with Robert Tilton for the past seven months. And he had proof to show that Tilton kept asking for more and more donations. So, in the end, he decided to keep the one dollar he was advised to send back and started his own church.
In the video, Oliver shows clips of various preachers who have used the donations to buy "parsonages" of land. He the jokes, " If by parsonage they mean, ‘house that looks like it costs the net worth of The Big Bang Theory‘s Jim Parsons.'"
The church has apparently been receiving donations, enough for Wanda-Jo to go to their "summer parsonage in Hawaii."
But while Wanda-Jo might be married and extorting money with her pastor husband Oliver, Dratch is not married in real life. She is however engaged to long-time boyfriend and baby daddy John Wahl. The couple met in 2009 and after dating for six months, she was pregnant with her son, Eli. He was born in 2010. Dratch has talked about being a mom after 40. She told People magazine, "Everyone says, ‘You’re not getting any sleep,’ but I’m used to this. The SNL hours gave me a bit of an advantage.”
Dratch currently lives in New York with Eli and partner Wahl.