Seán Cullen

Actor-comedian Sean Cullen's long career began in the mid-1980s with Corky and the Juice Pigs, a quirky musical trio that served as the missing link between the nasal pop pastiche of Weird Al Yankovic and the tongue-in-cheek but radio-ready sounds of Barenaked Ladies--a band the Juice Pigs brought along as their opener for a Canadian tour in the early 1990s. Music has remained an important part of Cullen's act, which still includes impersonations of singers from Bob Dylan to R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. His especially unhinged brand of comedy and ability to speak with a wide variety foreign accents has benefited him in the world of animation, where he has landed roles as the Devil's son on "Jimmy Two-Shoes," as an Southern-fried cyborg on Teletoon's anime-influenced high-school mystery, "Detentionaire," and as multiple characters on the Maurice Sendak-inspired children's show "Seven Little Monsters." Though Cullen is little-known outside of the Canadian entertainment industry, the Gemini-award winner did gain some attention from American audiences when he made it to the second-to-last round of NBC's "Last Comic Standing" in 2008. Cullen has found acclaim as an author of young-adult novels, including the Arthur Ellis-award winning "Hamish X and the Cheese Pirates," the first in a series of tongue-in-cheek mysteries. His writing style, which employs extensive footnotes and asides, suggests the influence of the late British humorist Douglas Adams.