Saturday Night Live Salutes Animated Genius

Each season, "Saturday Night Live'' throws together a couple of "best-of'' clip shows, paying tribute to some prominent cast member (John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, Gilda Radner) or a regular guest host (Tom Hanks, Steve Martin).
This Saturday, though, "SNL'' will pay homage to someone you've probably never heard of: Robert Smigel, who has been a staff writer for the late night show off and on since 1985 and is the creator of "Saturday TV Funhouse,'' a staple of the series since 1996.
"I guess I'm getting this special because they've finally given up on me leaving,'' says Smigel, 46, with considerable bemusement. "Or maybe it's a cue like, `Well, if we give him a special, maybe he'll leave.' ''
In fact, Smigel's sly and sharply satirical 'toons have been the one consistently funny feature of "SNL'' in recent seasons.
This week's show will be a 90-minute sampler of his animated work: the parodies of Disney and Hanna-Barbera cartoons, such recurring 'toons as "The X-Presidents,'' and ``Fun With Real Audio,'' in which actual recordings of politicians and celebrities are matched with outrageous visuals.
There also will be new material from Smigel's most famous cartoon creation, "Ace and Gary, the Ambiguously Gay Duo,'' voiced by Steve Carell ("The Office'') and Stephen Colbert ("The Colbert Report'').
Smigel started on "SNL'' as a sketch writer for real people, often working with Dana Carvey and Conan O'Brien. He still works with O'Brien on "Late Night,'' most notably as the man behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the cigar-chewing puppet who has offended everyone from the people of Quebec to Eminem (in a famously nasty confrontation at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards).
Smigel wrote some well-remembered skits for the "SNL'' cast and hosts over the years, including "Trekkies (Get a Life!),'' which gave William Shatner a chance to ridicule obsessive "Star Trek'' fans. Smigel moved on to be the first head writer for "Late Night'' and then became executive producer of the short-lived "Dana Carvey Show'' on ABC, which is where he began to work with animation.
The Ambiguously Gay Duo, a spoof of all the speculation about the real relationship between Batman and Robin, originated on the Carvey show. "Getting it through ABC prime time was, well, interesting,'' Smigel recalls. "The show was following `Home Improvement,' and they were very, very careful about what they were letting on.''
For one thing, he says, ABC executives "insisted on knowing all the colors'' being used in the cartoon, including the color of Ace and Gary's penis-shaped car.
"So I wrote down, `Peach.' And it got through,'' says Smigel. "So now, whenever I have problems with the censors, I write down, `Peach.' ''
"SNL'' executive producer Lorne Michaels and NBC have given Smigel a fair amount of leeway with his cartoons over the years.
"I have to decide myself pretty much'' what goes into one of the animated shorts, says Smigel. "It's very different from when I was purely a staff writer there. As a staff writer, you can write anything you want on Tuesday night, but it's completely up to Lorne and the head writers as to what gets on.
"In a way, it's great to have the freedom to put anything you want on the air. But on the flip side, I agonize over my ideas a lot more because I know chances are it's going to be on television and it's going to have my name on it, and I don't want it to suck. So now I drive myself crazy.''
The resulting satire is often outrageous, just a bit tamer in some cases than what Trey Parker and Matt Stone get away with on "South Park.''
In one holiday cartoon, Smigel did a sendup of the classic "Peanuts'' Christmas special in which Charlie Brown and the gang decorated a homeless person instead of a tree. In 2001's "Narrator That Ruined Christmas'' -- one of Smigel's favorites -- a cartoon snowman refused to tell the story of Rudolph because he was too distraught over the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Earlier this month, Smigel took a devastating whack at the Disney empire, one of his favorite targets. The bit, which included a wicked parody of "Song of the South'' and Scar from "The Lion King'' as a nasty Disney attorney, was so popular that it quickly was downloaded onto numerous Web sites.
Smigel is still fine-tuning which of his pieces will be part of Saturday's show. "I'm going to try to avoid redundancy,'' he says. "Which is tough, because some of the recurring themes in my cartoons are Disney and genitals and superheroes. So we have to portion them out with restraint.''
But Smigel has his limits.
"I've worked feverishly to avoid connecting `Brokeback Mountain' to the Ambiguously Gay Duo,'' he says. "If I can do anything for the country with this special, it's spare viewers one more `Brokeback Mountain' parody.''
from The Mercury News