Will Ferrell was awared the James Joyce award by Ireland’s University College Dublin. The award has been given to a variety of celebrities and politicians, “including U.S. civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, former South African President F.W. de Klerk and former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix.”
He accepted the award with a levity that can only be delivered by Ferrill himself. “James Joyce spent a lot of his life living outside of Ireland. I too have spent a lot of time living outside of Ireland.”
“As I perused my leatherbound volumes of ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Finnegans Wake,’ ‘Dubliners,’ ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’ standing in my mahogany library, a lot of feelings ran across my mind. Like: ‘Damn, I should have read these books.’”
