Joel McHale Jokes: I'm Related to Oprah, Too!

USMagazine, Tuesday, January 25, 2011, 10:06am (PST)

Oh, brother!

Hours after Oprah Winfrey shocked viewers when she introduced her long-lost half-sister Patricia, Community's Joel McHale made a startling announcement of his own.

"The rumors are true," McHale, 39, tweeted Monday. "I'm Oprah's half-sister."

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"Believe me I'm more shocked than you," the Soup host continued. "To know that I'm related to Oprah and find out I'm a woman. It's almost too much."

Kidding aside, Winfrey had viewers on the edge of their seats as she described how Patricia, a single mother of two, had been given up for adoption in Milwaukee by their mother, Vernita Lee, in 1963.

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"I was 9 years old at the time of her adoption, living with my father in Nashville, Tennessee," Winfrey, 56, said on her show Monday. "I had no idea my mother was even pregnant."

Determined to find her birth mother, Patricia -- whose last name was not revealed on Monday's show -- said she first discovered her familial ties in 2007, but kept the news to herself to protect Winfrey's privacy.

"Since I have been a person known in the public, there have been few times that I've been anywhere and not been sold out," Winfrey told Patricia while choking back tears. "There have been few times where you can bring anybody new into your life and not have that person in some way betray you or use you or take advantage of you."

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"Patricia tried and tried and tried again to get responses from my mother and other people in the family. She never once thought to go to the press. She never once thought to sell this story," she continued. "When I heard this about you, I said, 'Regardless if it's true or not true, I had to meet you because I wanted to meet somebody who had that kind of character.' So thank you.'"

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