They Deserve More Than a Tie for Father’s Day : Among all the TV dads, these should be saluted for giving lasting lessons and some welcome laughs.

With Father’s Day arriving Sunday, it’s appropriate to take note of some television dads who mattered, even if it was merely for being funny. There are oodles of the species, the corny along with the conventional. Here is one man’s list of five:

* Sheriff Andy Taylor, “The Andy Griffith Show,” 1960-68. Symbolically, at least, Andy occupied a paternal pedestal for the entire town of Mayberry. But the “Opie the Birdman” episode alone--one of the more tender and charming half hours in decades of sitcomdom--earns him a place on the list.

When little Opie (Ron Howard) accidentally kills a mother bird with his new slingshot, Andy doesn’t give his son a whipping or even a tongue lashing. Instead he takes Opie upstairs to a window so that he can hear the orphaned chicks chirping for their dead mama.

Opie is small, but he’s no brick. Getting the message about responsibility, he ends up raising the young birds himself. Once they’ve matured enough to be returned to the wild, however, Opie laments how empty his bird cage seems. Andy again comes through. “But,” he tells his son, “don’t the trees sound nice and full?”

* Jim Anderson, “Father Knows Best,” 1954-62. Exposure to reruns of this fantasy is a perfect antidote to the parade of dysfunctional, shouting, freaky families that go public on daytime talk shows with their infinite hatreds and pettiness.

Actually, Jim (Robert Young) didn’t always know best. But as head of a highly functional household in Springfield whose problems were usually resolved with some kind of simple moral lesson by the end of the half hour, he did always know how to make things better. Yet he wasn’t the kind of I-told-you-so, know-it-all preacher whom you could easily resent. Could he help it if he was blessed with superior male wisdom?

On occasion Jim could get frustrated or impatient, but only mildly so, and his anger--such as it was--never lingered. His most memorable quality was his relentless geniality.

Why was sage Jim always so unruffled? Because he was Robert Young, that’s why. Whether in this series or as the all-knowing physician in “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” Young projected calm and order. What a kick it would have been for him to have played a real-life father: murder victim Jose Menendez. Eric and Lyle rush in with their shotguns, and smiling Robert Young greets them with a cup of Maxwell House coffee. “Boys, why so irritable?”

* Homer Simpson, “The Simpsons,” 1990-continuing. An anthropological aberration who was once mistaken for Big Foot in a national forest, Homer (the voice of Dan Castellaneta) not only never knows best, he never knows anything. Be assured that whatever advice he gives his kids, it will be the wrong advice.

Some fatherly role model. He’s stupid and lazy, a human celery stalk, a TV zombie and doughnut-devouring slacker in his job at the pollution-spewing nuclear plant in Springfield (surely a different Springfield from the Andersons’ pristine hamlet). He’s a belching beer belly who lets nothing get in the way of his pursuit of the expedient.

As a bonus, he is insensitive to his wife, Marge (Julie Kavner), and kids. His genius daughter, Lisa (Yeardley Smith), is a sax-playing prodigy whose sweet wailing he regards as noise. And his communication with his son, Bart (Nancy Cartwright), goes something like this: “Why you little . . . .”

Why celebrate him as a father? Because, despite his flaws, Homer is essentially sweet natured, and because his dead brain has helped make “The Simpsons” one of the funniest comedies of the ‘90s. And, ironically, one of the smartest.

* Al Bundy, “Married . . . With Children,” 1987-continuing. Al (Ed O’Neill) is Homer Simpson with guile and a higher (barely) IQ. “Married . . . With Children” was conceived as a counterpoint to traditional family sitcoms featuring parents, a couple of kids and a dog. It has taken those formulaic components and raunchily distorted them, making the son (David Faustino) a junior scam artist, the daughter (Christina Applegate) a brainless bimbo, the mother (Katey Sagal) a hair-teased soap-opera freak and the father a lewd, crude oaf who gets euphoric just thinking about escaping his family.

What kind of parents are the Bundys? When Kelly and Bud bring home their school dental checkups, Peg and Al shine flashlights in their mouths and send them upstairs, saying, “We’ll forge your dental records later.”

When Bud turns 18, Al shows the proper attention as he sits down in front of the TV set: “Eighteen years old, huh? Son, there’s so much I want to say to you . . . but there’s a show coming on.”

Peg wonders if Al will use this occasion to pass on fatherly wisdom to Bud--like what to do when his “bellybutton, ear and rear end itch at the same time.” But Al, who is lacking in a few parenting skills, has other plans for Bud. He takes him to a nudie bar.

Hardly a great father, but a memorable one.

* Jack Arnold, “The Wonder Years,” 1988-93. Compared to other dads on this list, Kevin Arnold’s father is both underdeveloped and peripheral, in part because “The Wonder Years” was that rare series whose universe--America in the 1960s and ‘70s--was presented entirely through the eyes of a boy. Even so, Jack (Dan Lauria) was ever-present and sometimes was deployed as a catalyst to help Kevin (Fred Savage) better understand his parents and the rest of the world around him.

In one especially notable episode, young Kevin is exposed to a bracing reality of adulthood when he accompanies his often gruff, uncommunicative father to his white-collar job. While at the office, something unexpected happens. Kevin sees his dad get loudly chewed out by his boss, just the kind of humiliating experience that no father would want his son to witness.

Yet instead of diminishing his father in his eyes, the experience is a bonding exercise that gives Kevin empathy for his dad. Now he understands what his father endures to make a living for his family and why he is often in a rotten mood when he arrives home from work.

The son learns the lesson; the father--by inadvertently exposing his vulnerability--delivers it.