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The comedy of Robert Smigel is often hit-or-miss, but always offensive. He is Conan O’Brien’s head writer, the creator, puppeteer and voice of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, and he is the guy who does all those animated shorts on Saturday Night Live over the past decade or so, also called TV Funhouse.

Smigel’s comedy is edgy and often appalling. He’s not made for prime time, and he’s not part of the Bill Cosby, polite comedy crowd. Now, that either makes him appeal to you, or it doesn’t, and your response to that will largely determine whether you find this DVD collection, Comedy Central’s TV Funhouse, to be an entertaining romp, or an offensive pile of garbage.

The important thing to realize is that TV Funhouse is a satire of children’s television programming, but one that is definitely not in any way intended for kids; it’s intended for adults in their 40s and older who remember the Howdy Doody Show or Captain Kangaroo or Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and can appreciate the source material Smigel’s making fun of.

The collection includes skits like Wonderman, a near-perfect replica of the old Fleischer Superman cartoons of the 1950s or so, except that Wonderman only performs his heroic deeds to get his civilian alter-ego in bed with a woman.

That’s only scratching the surface; in this complete series collection, you’ll see sights like masturbating chickens, animals snorting “Christmas cheer” in cocaine-style fashion for weight loss, and the host getting “drunk and laid” with Robert Goulet in Atlantic City. Robert Goulet? See what I mean about this being for the 40 and older crowd yet? No one in the “12 and under” crowd would even know who that is. Most 20-somethings wouldn’t.

What it all boils down to is this: the show lasted a mere eight episodes on Comedy Central before being canned, largely because the controversy it generated never translated into ratings. And that’s what Smigel is like; you’ll either think he’s a genius or a parolee of some state’s Sex Offender program, and you’ll either laugh or you’ll think it’s trash. Sometimes, you may even experience both reactions.

But for those who appreciate Smigel, especially when he’s on-target, this collection is a must-have. Those easily offended shouldn’t even bother.

I’m over the whole Paris Hilton-Nicole Richie thing. The Simple Life was goofy fun the first season and went downhill from there, but when I had a chance to see the E! Channel-exclusive fifth season DVD, I figured why not. Even if it’s a tired concept by now, made so by the one-joke nature of the show, at least it’s some brainless fun on a boring Sunday afternoon.

Well, I was wrong on a couple of counts. First, I didn’t watch it on Sunday afternoon; my wife and I watched it together over a couple of weekday nights to fill time left void by the writer’s strike – even though it’s resolved, the airwaves are hardly filled with new content quite yet.

The second thing I was wrong about was assuming it would be too stupid, boring and repetitive to be worth the time invested. Were the pranks of Nicole and Paris silly, stupid and worn out? Well, for the most part, yeah. We’ve seen the “brainless bimbo” routine they pull on this series too many times now.

But what captured me were the small touches of charm, mode possible mostly by the non-celebrity cast members. Having the girls become camp counselors at a summer camp provided plenty of variety without tons of travel, and a core supporting cast who weren’t always completely shocked and Paris and Nicole’s narcissistic obsession with themselves. That provided a by-now-jaded viewer like me with some characters to relate to on the show.

The show throws Paris and Nicole some curves, from a weight loss camp to a couples camp to an actors camp and more. Through it all, the prankish hijinks Paris and Nicole devise are the most annoying part of the show; but when one of the male camp counselors starts falling for an allegedly newly-unattached Paris, the show provides some real moments.

The guy isn’t fooling himself; he admits to a fellow male camp counselor-buddy that he doesn’t expect the flirtation to last beyond the summer camp experience. There is a poignant moment, however, when his friend asks him, “I know you’re ready for that. But are you ready if it really does become something more?” The guy replied, “That’s a good question,” and it was.

Foolishly, the guy relies on Nicole for advice in capturing Paris’ eye, and being the devil she is, she misleads him consistently down paths that will humiliate him. While that works the first time to a degree, when she’s still doing it by the eighth episode, it just gets frustrating on a couple levels. First, why does the guy keep turning to Nicole, who’s never led him right once; and second, is it even remotely possible for Nicole to have an on-screen moment as real as the two male camp counselors had?

Sure, the show is pure put-on and one of the least-real of all reality shows; but this season as much as any shows why the show is so limited in appeal that it was booted off Fox to E! Namely, that Paris and Nicole’s adopted personas on the show are too flat and limited in their emotional range to either demonstrate any real acting ability, or to hold the interest of viewers who never see their on-screen characters grow or grow up.

The next-gen - now current-gen - console war has arrived and, already, the game has gotten dirty. For weeks before I acquired my PlayStation 3, I kept hearing a persistent rumor: when you get your PS3, don’t get rid of your PS2 right away if you want to play Final Fantasy XII - there’s a bug in backward compatibility and the game looks like crap on PS3.

The rumor had the desired effect, I guess. I hesitated to use my PS2 for trade credit toward a PS3. When I finally brought my PS3 home, however, being the natural skeptic that I am, I immediately popped in FFXII to see how bad it was.

Hear this now: the rumor is complete crap! After popping in the disk and playing a couple hours into the game, I can tell you that, if anything, FFXII looks better on PS3 than it did on PS2. Now, of course, if you have a PS3 connected to an HDTV and your HDTV utilizes only a 32Hz HDMI cable, then your results might be disappointing. But for most people, FFXII looks spectacular on PS2 or PS3. Don’t believe the anti-PS3 hype!

You know, Sony’s not perfect. Far from it. The PS3 launch was basically the PS2 launch on a weight loss program. Few of the launch titles are all that good. No one likes that the SixAxis controller doesn’t vibrate. The price of the system isn’t reasonable for the market no matter how you look at it. And Untold Legends just sucks.

Don’t folks think Sony has enough negatives going against it without piling on false crap? I mean, you have to buy a $15 card reader to transfer your game saves that you’ll only use once; there are some minor bugs on about 200 backward-compatible titles (which is a darn sight better than Xbox 360 not having backward compatibility at all for a majority of original Xbox titles); and you lose all your peripherals from the previous gen, meaning everything from your Karaoke Revolution microphone and dance pad to your $200 Gran Turismo 4 steering wheel are useless.

Is it really necessary to create lies on top of all that’s true?