It’s not easy being famous — and sometimes it’s not easy sharing a name with a celebrity.

A handful of NIU students can attest. Michael Jackson, Jenny Jones, Ricky Martin and Joshua Jackson have been through the laughs.

“It used to be bad in high school,” said Michael Jackson, a sophomore engineering major who lives at Neptune Hall.

Although Jackson still gets teased occasionally, there are good points to having the same name as a famous pop singer. For instance, no one forgets his name after they meet him. But although he has fun with the jokes, there are times he gets annoyed.

“I get prank phone calls once in a while,” he said. “One time someone called and started screaming like Jackson does. It was bad but funny.”

What if you were named the same as one of the most popular actors on “Dawson’s Creek”? Joshua Jackson, a freshman public law major, doesn’t exactly like the jokes, but he gets over them.

“Everybody on my floor calls me Pacey,” Jackson said, referring to the celebrity Jackson’s “Dawson” character.

His friends at home don’t give him a hard time, though it helps that they don’t watch the show. Jackson doesn’t regularly see “Dawson’s Creek,” either but has seen it a couple times.

Other students are also connected to television by name.

“In high school, they’d always ask what was going to be on the show,” said Jones, a junior computer science major linked to the daytime talk hostess.

Now she doesn’t get teased as much as she did in high school, but it really didn’t bother her then, she said.

Like other “famous” NIU students, Rick Martin, a freshman accounting major, also was the butt of more jokes in high school than in college.

“Many people ask me if I am ‘livin‘ la vida loca,'” Martin said.

It bugged him in high school, but now that the jokes mostly come from people on his floor, he doesn’t mind. Martin, who goes by Rick, said his

name could have been worse — like Jeffrey Dahmer.