Robert Smigel has long toiled along the hallowed fringes of the TV industry -- fringes, relative to his talents, that is -- creating memorable moments along the way. He's responsible for Triumph, the Insult-Comic Dog's acerbic attacks on everyone from "Star Wars" geeks to Eminem, as well as the (pointedly poorly) animated gems that pop up occasionally on what can be dispiriting episodes of "Saturday Night Live." (He also had an egregiously short-lived kid's-show parody series on Comedy Central.)

Tonight, "SNL" pays belated tribute to Smigel's contributions with a compilation of some of his more outrageous contributions. While it's true that MTV2's ferociously acidic "Wonder Showzen" makes Smigel's creations seem tame by comparison, his work remains pretty funny.

Hosted by The Ambiguously Gay Duo, a superhero team unhealthily obsessed with former "SNL" performer (and current has-been) Jimmy Fallon, "The Best of Saturday TV Funhouse" offers a nice compendium of Smigel's sensibility, which is a lot edgier than the show otherwise tends to be these days.

While "SNL's" political sketches these days tend toward the toothless, Smigel's short films have some bite: Take "Saddam and Osama," an anti-America propaganda cartoon ostensibly created for Muslim kids (and equally ostensibly co-written by Sean Penn, to boot). Or "Divertor," a superhero who creates celebrity scandals to distract the masses from the issues of the day. Or the snowman from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," who is bummed out by the post-9/11 world and takes children and Rudolph to visit Ground Zero in "The Narrator that Ruined Christmas." Or --

You get the idea. Smigel also offers unsubtle attacks on the religious right and Disney's craven marketing practices, as well as evergreen targets like Star Jones, Mr. T, Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith, here reimagined as a fat, lazy, stupid and whiny Smurfette past her prime. Even "SNL" creator Lorne Michaels isn't spared his scrutiny. And then there's the inexplicable "Shazzang," a genie who rescues innocent children from peril with no small amount of sadism.

Given how transgressive -- and, to be honest, puerile -- Smigel's sense of humor is, we should consider ourselves lucky that any TV show would allow him on the air.