Janeane Garafalo Discovers She Was Married For 20 Years And Didn’t Know It

I don’t usually post about celebrity news, but this one jumped out when I read the headline:

Apparently what happens in Vegas stays there … until your lawyer finds out about it.

Such is the lesson Janeane Garofalo and writer/producer Rob Cohen reportedly learned when they discovered they’d been married for the past 20 years, and just didn’t know it.

According to the New York Post’s Page Six, Garofalo recently recounted the scenario during the “Ben Stiller Show” reunion at the New York Comedy Festival. The 44-year-old comedic actress said that she married Cohen, a former writer for the “Ben Stiller Show,” in Vegas as a joke, not realizing that the marriage was the real deal.

“Rob and I got married, for real, which we had to have a notary dissolve not 30 minutes before we got here tonight,” Garofalo said Saturday. “We were married for 20 years until this evening.”

(…)

“We got married drunk …. We dated for a year, and we got married at a drive-through chapel in a cab,” she recalled. “[We thought] you have to go to the downtown courthouse and sign papers and stuff, so who knew? We were married, and apparently now that [Rob] is getting married for real, his lawyer dug up something.”

And here I thought such things only happened on television to people named Ross and Rachel.

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. legion says:

    I find this hilarious, but then I made the mistake of looking at the comments on the NYPost article. Wow, what a bunch of misogynist b*stards. Just pages full of vitriol.

  2. grumpy realist says:

    Hmmm. Reminds me of that favorite of Regency romance novels, where “marriage by assertion” in Scotland (usually in front of an innkeeper, where the hero is claiming the heroine is “my wife” in order to save her good name ) would create the typical oh-shit-we’re-actually-married twist in the next chapter.

  3. Rob in CT says:

    @legion:

    Never, EVER, read the comments on a newspaper article. NY Post is, of course, just asking for even more trouble than normal.

  4. legion says:

    @Rob in CT: True dat.